There’s been a bit of discussion lately about QR Codes, those blocky visual tags that try to make the real world machine-readable.

They’ve been with us for a while and, unlike NFC, most of us have had phones capable of using them for some time. But have you used QR codes more than once or twice in your life?

I certainly haven’t. Maybe in five years nostalgic 20-somethings will ask each other, “hey do you remember QR codes?”, and they will, but in the same way as my generation remembers laser discs or Global Hypercolour T-shirts: we knew they existed, but never really made them a part of our lives. There are too many points of failure:

Points of failure when using QR codes

Anyway, not everyone agrees with me about QR codes. Recently I came across this sign in an estate agent’s window on Upper Street, Islington:

"You'll be seeing more and more of these around" - sign in an Islington estate agent's window

Maybe they’re right, but I’m still not convinced.

It’s not that the fundamental idea is bad. Building bridges between the physical and virtual worlds makes sense, and hyperlinks or metadata embedded in real-world objects is an obvious way of doing that. But for the idea to succeed the execution has to be far more elegant than this.

There seem to be a lot of “UX ninjas” about these days. Are you one? Here’s a handy flowchart to help you find out:

Filling out forms is a necessary evil whether it’s on the web, mobile apps, work-related systems, or even on old-fashioned paper. We don’t enjoy doing it but sometimes there’s no other option.

Why are forms such a chore? Designers from multiple industries have been trying to solve this problem for decades. Indeed, every layer of the experience when we use a computerised form has been meticulously crafted to reduce our stress – from the ergonomics of the keyboard & mouse to interaction components like dropdowns, radio buttons and auto-completed text fields. But the fact remains that they’re a stressful part of our everyday lives.

A recent example of design being used to ease the pain of forms is Funnel, a survey tool for iOS and Android.

Using Funnel for customer satisfaction surveys

Funnel uses an approach designers commonly take to the form problem, which is to make the process feel more fun and playful in the hope that users will warm to it. What’s the rationale behind this approach? Is it really more fun to fill out forms that are designed like this?

Making traditional form interactions look nicer

The interaction models are pretty conventional, just designed in a way that makes them less intimidating (assuming you aren’t intimidated by large smiley faces, of course). While this layer of design might be dismissed as superficial by people who focus on functionality, it definitely matters. The visual layer provides users with a subconscious cue as to the type of activity they’re about to undertake, and this will in turn affect their emotional state as they embark upon the activity.

Imagine two different signup forms, both asking for the same set of personal information, except one has been designed for a mortgage application process and the other for a music-oriented social networking site. They might even use the same set of interaction models – dropdowns, calendars, radio buttons – but we’d be surprised if the visual execution was identical. The mortgage provider should use visual design to convey an appropriate level of seriousness; after all, entering the wrong information may lead to rejection, or might count as fraud in extreme cases. However, this level of seriousness would seem oddly intimidating in the case of the social networking site.

Guess which one of these forms is a mortgage application

But is it enough to focus purely on the visual execution of forms, as Funnel seems to do, if we want to make them less painful? The visual, aesthetic layer design is slightly problematic in that it’s very culturally sensitive. A design that suggests playful informality in one part of the world might seem downright childish in another. This layer is also very subject to changing trends – a visual style that seems contemporary one year might become dated and corny very quickly. So perhaps it’s time to tackle the problem of forms at a deeper layer than purely visual design.

What are forms for? To gather information from users. Do we always need highly specific and granular data? No. Are we still dependent on keyboard, mouse and touch inputs? No. Can new devices and the data they can gather fundamentally change the form-completion process? Maybe.

Imagine a mobile form that works like a theremin, where the user lifts their device to change the value of a field, or tilts the phone to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Imagine a restaurant whose mobile app gathers feedback not with a slider, but by having customers express themselves with a smile or grimace and then taking a photo and algorithmically “scoring” their satisfaction. Imagine a rail company using location data to invoke a customer satisfaction survey when a journey ends, referring to timetable data to work out if the train was late and pre-populating the form as appropriate.

Some of these ideas may be less far-fetched than they sound at first. For example, the Happy Things project for Mac OS detects when you smile and automatically takes a picture of your face. It’s becoming easier for software to gauge our emotions as well as our location.

There’s a lot of scope for innovation in the way systems gather input from users, especially where mobile devices with richer contextual awareness are concerned. The process can become more powerful as well as more playful, as long as we continue to challenge ourselves as an industry and as designers. Why not exploit these capabilities instead of – or as well as – making checkboxes feel nicer?

(Edit: less than nine hours after I posted this article, Yahoo! announced plans to shut down Delicious. I guess there’s a reason why people call Yahoo! the place good ideas go to die)

If you haven’t heard of Delicious, all you need to know is that it stores your bookmarks on the web. This is handy because you can access them from anywhere and share them with other people.

Delicious used to be pretty exciting. Social bookmarking, tagging, RSS feeds – the potential seemed mind-boggling. But then Yahoo! bought it and it started losing its edge. Nowadays there isn’t much excitement about Delicious, but it’s still useful.

One thing that makes Delicious particularly useful is the availability of various browser extensions. These extensions put a little button on your browser, allowing you to add and tag a page really, really quickly. Because it’s quick to add a page, you find yourself adding more pages – and the more pages you add, the more useful Delicious becomes.

I use the Delicious extension for Google Chrome quite a lot, but I think I hate it. Here’s what it looks like:

So you click on the “tag” button,  and then this appears:

So far so good. But when you use this several times a day, you’ll notice some annoying and even hateworthy things about it.

The first thing is that it has no persistence. If you’ve typed a brief, witty description of the page in the Notes field, and then carefully selected some tags to go with it, you don’t really want to go through that process again. But if you accidentally click outside the extension, that’s precisely what you’ll have to do – because it forgets what you’ve entered! Having to re-enter stuff I’ve already typed isn’t something I enjoy, even when it’s a relatively small amount of text.

The second thing I hate about it is the placement of the Save and Cancel keys. You’ll notice that Cancel is in the bottom right, which is slightly unconventional – primary actions (Submit, Confirm etc) are usually placed to the right in forms like this. They’re also very close to one another. These two design choices conspire to make it a little bit too easy to hit Cancel by mistake – especially when you’re working quickly. Hitting Cancel closes the extension, meaning that – you guessed it – anything you’ve typed will need to be typed again.

So these are the two reasons why I hate the Chrome extension for Delicious. If it remembered the stuff you typed, however, I would probably love it. This shows how fine a line there is between love and hate in user interface design, or (more likely) how much of a pedant I am about these things…

Google is testing a new feature on its main search page, and I seem to have become an unwitting guinea pig.

The feature is called “streaming” (edit: it was actually Google Instant, which went live a few days later) and the idea is that the search results page is dynamically generated as you type into the search box. You don’t have to click “Search” for the results to appear. You could think of it as the “suggested results” box on steroids.

Initially, the results page is completely blank waiting for your input:

Then, as soon as you type something, Google starts to run a search. I had to move quickly to get this screenshot:

A few milliseconds later Google has come up with some results, which then appear on the search results page:

At this point I’ve yet to click “search”, but doing so will only clear the auto-suggest box – the results are there already. And the whole thing happens so quickly you don’t really notice it, as your focus is on the search box you’re typing into.

Does it improve Google? It’s difficult to say. Fast Company were sceptical about it when it was announced back in August. It certainly doesn’t mar the experience, once the initial surprise has worn off, but it doesn’t really enhance it either. In fact it’s mildly frustrating to see your desired result on the screen, but to have it obscured by the auto-suggest menu until you click return.

Maybe the main benefit is the slightly extended life your keyboard will enjoy if this feature becomes official, as you’ll be hitting the return key far less frequently.

NB: this post is a continuation of “The city as interface (part one)“, published on 6th August 2010

The modern city is a built environment whose purpose isn’t just to house and feed us. It offers us access to both information and capability, and it has evolved ways to help us to understand and navigate its considerable complexity.

In this sense the city is an interface and the people within it, residents and visitors alike, are its users. But the city is not a passive interface. It is a highly responsive one which evolves continually over time.

This constant development is the result of many social and economic factors which I’m not going to explore here. Instead, I’m going to look at two mechanisms that help cities become more effective the more they are used – adaptability and feedback.

Multiple layers of experience

Many modern cities are so complex that even if you spend your whole life in one you’ll never fully understand it. London’s taxi drivers experience physical changes in their brains after spending years memorising its street map, which is just one of the city’s many layers. So what hope is there for the visitors experiencing it for the first time?

The fact is that cities are not allowed to be complicated. If they can’t successfully accommodate outsiders, the outsiders won’t stay, and the city won’t be a city for much longer. The city must therefore be adaptive – it must offer a range of experiences to its users based on the extent of their familiarity and expertise.

A first-time visitor must be able to access the features they need to use without being confused and obstructed by those they don’t. Cities achieve this by using transport networks to negate their geography, or by having certain locals (such as London’s taxi drivers) learn the intricacies so that others don’t have to.

Locals have a better background knowledge of the city so, like power users of a computer system, most things they do become habitual, almost instinctive. But the interface of the city still accommodates their needs. An example of this in many cities is the bus system, which tends to be optimised for locals at the expense of outsiders.

Computer interfaces have similar ways of providing a layered experience to users, and the less specialised the interface the more layers there are. The Nintendo DS has a specific purpose, so its interface has very few layers. More advanced users might configure the clock or change wireless settings, but there’s little else to do apart from load a game:

Systems like Mac OS or Windows are very different. There is a “welcoming” layer aimed at newcomers in which commonly used applications and features are highly visible, and many people use an OS for years without moving on from this layer. But under the surface there are other layers – the registry, the command line, the process list – which can seem intimidating but are essential tools for other users of the system.

Multi-purpose interfaces fail if they intimidate new users with difficult features, and they also fail if they force experienced users to wear kid gloves. A strong interface, like a successful city, will accommodate both user types and all the grey areas in between.

Becoming a part of the interface

When we “use” cities,  they use us too. They incorporate us into the experience offered to other people – we become part of the show. Here’s an example.

One morning last week I was walking to my local tube station. Before long I started to sense that something was wrong. As I got closer to the station this conviction grew, and eventually turned out to be correct: the station was shut and all hell was breaking loose.

How did I know there was a problem? I hadn’t received a text alert or seen any signs. Instead, I’d used something that many city dwellers use all the time, often without knowing – the city’s feedback mechanism.

On that morning I noticed, almost subconsciously, that there were more people than normal on the pavements. Several people apparently dressed for work were walking away from the tube station, or looking confused and directionless. It was subtle but noticeable, and as I noticed it my behaviour changed also. Before long I was part of the feedback mechanism, part of the crowd whose behaviour informed others that the tube station wasn’t working.

The city is full of behavioural patterns that we observe, follow, and unwittingly learn from all the time. Their importance can’t be overstated. Remove the flow of humanity and the city becomes a surreal, frightening place, a sensation that was exploited by the film 28 Days Later.

The inherent eeriness of an empty city

It’s only recently, in the age of social software, that computer interfaces have developed the ability to emulate this sort of feedback mechanism. Older interfaces couldn’t reflect aggregate user behaviour in the experiences offered to individual users. But in today’s online environment things are different.

When you browse Amazon, your navigational choices are used by the system to influence the choices that subsequent visitors will see. When you watch a video on Youtube, you add to its view count in a way that’s visible to others. And if you removed the flow of users from Twitter or Facebook you’d be left with literally nothing at all.

Modern interfaces are starting to use feedback mechanisms similar to those that cities have been using for centuries. Our use of the system affects the system, and affects how others experience it too. The dividing line between the user and the interface becomes a blur.

Conclusion

Analogy is a slippery slope. Successful interactive interfaces may well have lots in common with successful cities, and we may well think of the city as an interface, but the analogy shouldn’t be taken too far. Cities have spatial constraints that computer systems don’t share, and they tend to be the result of long-term evolutionary design processes rather than centrally directed ones.

But even with these differences in mind there’s a lot we can learn from how cities function as interfaces. Cities solve problems that interactive systems have only recently become sophisticated enough to have. If we can understand those problems well enough, the modern city can be a treasure trove of inspiration and insight to designers of future interactive systems.

Dirk Kneymeyer of Involution Studios writes on his blog about how he’s losing faith in UX. He’s reacting primarily to an article by Whitney Hess characterising start-ups as being focused on the what rather than the who, why or how.

One of Kneymeyer’s central points is that product strategy and user experience are ultimately different domains, and that user experience professionals aren’t typically the most qualified people to define product strategy.

I’m inclined to agree with that point. Because user experience, as an emerging discipline, is still consolidating many of its techniques and methodologies, there’s an exuberant tendency that often sees UX extending its dominion into other areas. This can sometimes be appropriate – it’s a good thing, for example, that user experience practitioners increasingly concern themselves with content strategy –  but in other cases it blurs the definition of what user experience is, and it can sometimes come across as disrespectful towards professionals in other fields.

There is an obvious overlap between user experience and product strategy, centred around scenario planning. But even this exercise works very differently in a user experience context than it does in a strategy & planning one. Scenario planning in a strategic context involves having to discard or gloss over some issues that are central to ‘traditional’ UX, while becoming obsessed with details that a typical UX project would leave to one side.

My experience of working with people who specialise in product strategy is that it’s a well developed field in its own right. Yes, it can learn from experienced UX professionals (and it knows it can – I’ve noticed increasing interest in UX from product & business strategy teams in the last two years), but the opportunities for learning are reciprocal and not just one-way.

In Responsive Environments: Architecture, Art and Design, writer Lucy Bullivant refers to urban environments as “interfaces in their own right”. Reading this, I found myself wondering – do modern cities function as interfaces? If so, how? And can designers of interactive systems find new inspiration by thinking of cities in this way?

“The map is not the territory”

By expressing functionality in a way that’s more suited to our needs, interfaces help us understand and act upon devices and systems that could otherwise be confusing. They’re most helpful when something’s function is not directly expressed by its form: a pencil doesn’t need an interface, but a pencil sharpener might.

From this perspective, it could be said that the Tube map of London is an interface for the city. After all, it abstracts the tangled system of London streets into a neatly organised network of straight lines, making its complexity manageable even to tourists. But this is incorrect. It’s the tube network itself – not the Tube map – that acts as an interface for London.

This is because the Tube map isn’t actually an abstraction: it might distort geography, but it represents the network’s structure faithfully. The network itself is the abstraction, the layer of navigation that helps us forget the confusing mess of streets and avenues above ground. It is interactive: we can use it. The Tube map is an ingenious visualisation of that interface, but is not an interface in itself. As Alfred Korzybski said, the map is not the territory.

So when we think of cities as interfaces, we should go beyond thinking of visualisations and maps and focus instead on how the physical make-up of the city facilitates its use.

The problems cities are required to solve

All human settlements have certain things in common. Places for people to eat and sleep, and facilities for producing food, materials and so on. Another is navigation. Even the smallest hamlet has a navigational or wayfinding role to play, acting as a landmark for passing travellers with no interest in local happenings.

These three basic roles – habitation, production and navigation – apply to almost every place that people live. But in larger settlements additional uses are encountered. A traveller passing through a town might look for medical assistance, or establishments providing food and accommodation. In a larger town, there might be thriving local industries, academic institutions, working artisans.

As settlements grow in size these roles explode in number. These in turn attract ever more visitors, many of whom establish businesses and institutions and therefore add to the range of uses on offer. After a while the vast size and complexity of the settlement begins to pose a new challenge: how can anyone possibly understand everything that’s happening?

It’s in response to this challenge of incomprehensibility that the “interface” of the city has evolved over time.

The designed environment

As cities grow, they effectively become designed environments. Rivers are submerged beneath roads, hills and valleys are smoothed over, landfill and burial sites override the natural topography. When we’re surrounded by city we’re in an environment shaped (consciously or not) by humans, an environment whose very structure has a function: to point us towards the roles, uses and amenities that the city offers.

If the city’s environment fails to do this well, the city itself is failing. Visitors looking to sell won’t locate the businesses willing to buy. People needing help won’t know where to look for it. The “functionality” of the city will go undiscovered and the city won’t be used. The goal of the urban environment is to make the city’s functionality discoverable to its users.

Patterns

The structure of a city, then, has objectives in common with “conventional” interfaces – to help users locate and utilise underlying capability. In a city, this capability could be anything from acquiring a visa to buying a rare, imported album. In a computer system, it might be turning the wi-fi antenna off and on. But in cities, the number of capabilities is significantly greater. So how do cities help us make sense of them?

One way – which can also be seen in interactive interface design – is through the presence of patterns which help make cities comprehensible. As we enter an unfamiliar city from its outskirts, we will probably know without being told when we’re entering its central district. Other patterns are more specialised. Record collectors visiting unfamiliar cities will often find record shops easily, thanks to the patterns that “signpost” those sorts of areas.

Just as computer interfaces use patterns to accommodate the mental models of their users, cities use them to reward familiarity: the more cities you know, the easier it is to find your way around the ones you don’t. And there’s a functional importance too. These patterns often develop into localised “clusters” within which industries or disciplines are closely concentrated, such as the cluster of media businesses around Soho or the legal profession’s concentration around Chancery Lane.

Grouping related controls in Windows 7

When this happens the city isn’t just making itself easier to navigate, it’s making itself easier to operate, just as an interactive system is more usable when similar features are placed near one another. And when cities are easy to operate, all constituent parts – from local businesses to visiting strangers – feel the benefits.

So far we’ve explored how the structures of successful cities share some of the conventions of successful interfaces. But real interfaces are interactive – they aren’t just static maps and informational aids. When we do something with them, we receive feedback and response. The second part of this post will look at how the city provides feedback and how, when we  use a city, we become a part of the interface ourselves.

This is part one of a two-part post. Click here for part two of this article

Since the launch of the iPad, hubris and hysteria among technology commentators has been gradually increasing. The device is the future; Rupert Murdoch thinks it’s the saviour of journalism; it will change the world; it “can replace any real-world object you own”.

One notion that I take exception to, however, is that the iPad signals the death of the keyboard and that touch interfaces are destined for ubiquity.

Now, I’m no technological conservative – I’ve been using touch-screen phones since before the iPhone came out. But I think a more fundamental point is being missed here, which is that the roles computers play in our lives are multiplying greatly.

Computers used to play a relatively limited set of roles which could be supported with a common set of interface models, mainly centred around the keyboard and the mouse. The keyboard & mouse setup worked when the computer operator was sat at a desk, had enter lots of data from a large character set, and needed direct access to many (maybe even several hundred) on-screen controls offered by their applications.

Today, not every computer user is sat at a desk and in the need state described above. Computer users might be on the other end of a phone line from the machine itself, operating it through a (notoriously infuriating) voice interface. They might be delivering a parcel and collecting the recipient’s signature using a handheld computer’s (notoriously infuriating) pen interface. And of course the computer user might be using a personal device like a smartphone, which needs to be small and light and whose functions don’t require the sort of  intricate and precise interactions supported by the keyboard/mouse combo.

But this doesn’t change the fact that some computer users will still be in situations where the keyboard and mouse paradigm is appropriate. Therefore the keyboard will not die.

What things like the iPad illustrate is that we are using computers more than we used to – in a wider number of contexts and for a wider range of reasons. They don’t replace what we already have, they’re just a new addition to our collection of tools.

I’ve been trying to codify some guidelines for writing for the web recently, and came across this study (PDF) by Wichita University’s Software Usability Research Laboratory in 2005.

The study involved 66 graduate students with either normal or corrected vision being given a short story to read online. A preliminary reading test was carried out on participants so the study could predetermine their reading speed. Different text layouts were used, such as multiple column, full justification and so on. Study participants were tested for both reading speed and reading comprehension.

• Reading speed: Multiple-column layouts impaired reading speed when text was left-justified. However, left-justified text was read more quickly in a single column layout than full-justified text. The highest reading speed was 269.33 words per minute for two-column, full-justified text.
• Reading comprehension: No significant variation was found across the different text formats.
• Fast versus slow readers: Faster readers benefited most from the 2-column, fully-justified layout. Slow readers benefited from 1-column, left-justified text.

The study was perhaps limited by the fact that the participants, as undergraduates, were heavier readers of online text than the average member of the population. I’d be interested to see if any similar studies have been carried out with a larger sample size, broader age range and a more representative mix of internet ‘natives’ versus internet ‘newbies’. Does anyone know of any? If I find some I’ll post them here.