Proofiness is the mathematical version of "truthiness." It lurks in business, politics, media, and yes - user research.

If Charles Seife’s Proofiness has a lasting contribution to offer those in the fields of user experience, design, or even business, it will be in the elegant branding of its own subjectivist epistemology.  This, in itself, is no small victory.  It involves taking a complex debate on the origin of knowledge and in a single catchy word, turning it into a meme.  Picture a future where somebody whips out a clever piece of marketing research in a design or business meeting, something with lots of correlations and a confident sounding sample.   Maybe there is a scientific looking visualization,  like a scatterplot diagram with one of those Jackson Pollack splatters of microscopic pinpoints, something that screams data was collected here.  Its presenter starts speaking with the cajoling air of someone trying to impress the truth, with a capital ‘T,’ upon their audience.  And then suddenly, the attendees stand in protest and accuse their tormenter, in unison, of proofiness.

Then try to grasp what a profound departure that is from today’s climate of info digestion, where almost nothing is spit back if it smells and tastes like it was cooked up from numbers.   Jakob Nielsen, the founding father of pragmatism in HCI research, has condemned number fetishism in our field periodically since he came to prominence in the early 1990s – most exasperatingly in this 2004 post, The Risk of Quantitative Studies.   He writes, “…most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies.  Design research is not like medical science.” In a 2009 post, five years later, little has changed.  He writes, “People still pay far more attention to questionable quantitative studies than they do to simpler qualitative studies that have much greater validity.”

If those of us in the innovation game are struggling with number fetishism, that is saying quite a lot. User and design research is about human cognition and emotion, pretty squishy topics really.  And design, which is generally carried out in the service of business, is an applied field.  What business person has the time to wrestle with taking the uncertainty factor below a certain threshold of instinctive confidence?  (The genius of Nielsen’s discount usability method was in demonstrating that closing in on the uncertainty factor has a long, expensive tail as it approaches zero – which, of course, it never does.  n=3 represents a lot of bang for the buck, and n=2000 a lot less so.) Why, then, are we so persuaded by numeric evidence?

Unlike the output from qualitative research studies, usually called insights, numbers have a primordial pull on us.  They are more valuable entities in social exchange, a fact which our lizard brains are fully aware of.  Numbers can be transmitted with less nuance, that is to say, less noise, and are therefore choice currency.   Seife provides evidence that human beings are capable of reacting to numbers from somewhere biologically deep, processing them somewhere in the muscles and tissue and nerves but not necessarily with the intellect.  “No matter how idiotic, how unbelievable an idea is, numbers can give it credibility.” (p.8)  He cites an example of MSNBC host Deborah Norville reporting with a straight face that 58% of all exercise done in America is broadcast on television.  3.5 billion situps were done in 2003, she reported.  Two million and 300,000 of those on exercise shows.  “The numbers had short-circuited Norville’s brain,” Siefe notes, “rendering her completely incapable of critical thought.”

Our lust for numbers is like our lust for sweet and fatty foods. Two million years of evolution have taught us to crave them.  But in the modern world, where they are not only in abundance, but easily manipulated and processed with the explicit goal of satiating us, they are dangerous.   The author lays out, in clear language, the heart of his epistemic argument.  Once a number tries to describe the real world, or “acquires a unit” in Seife’s language, it loses its purity.   There is always a measurement bias of one sort or another and therefore it can no longer inhabit the “platonic realm of absolute truth.”(p.10) He writes this without apologizing for it or acknowledging its provocativeness. But this is no mainstream view. This is a rejection of the very idea of structure or universal truth, a return to the Dionysian notion that the sublime lies in closeness of experience and not in critical distance. This is the sort of postmodern thinking that was radical in intellectual circles as recently as the 1960s.  This is Piaget.  This is Derrida.  And maybe because of that inaccessibility, this sort of thinking is still far from being absorbed into the fabric of our daily thoughts and culture in business life.

Enter proofiness.  A great term, a self-descriptive masterpiece of nomenclature. Its dubious etymological structure (with its comic closeness to being a real word, a science word) carries its actual semantic argument.  Of course, the author, Charles Seife, had some help in this.  The word is a clear homage to television comic, Stephen Colbert’s, famous neologism “truthiness.”  But it is Seife who brings it to the concept of proof, not truth.  Truthiness, which applies to information that has the patina of truth, is pure social criticism.  Proofiness, which also applies to information that has the patina of truth, is an attack on status quo views of ontological reality.  Truthiness, like the Bushism ‘strategery,’is aimed at easy targets and misanthropes- liars, manipulators, unilateralists, oversimplifiers.  Proofiness is aimed at all of us with the instinct to prove, and therefore at the natural condition of mankind itself.  “Proofiness has power over us because we’re blind to this impurity (of numbers).  Numbers, charts, graphs all have an aura of perfection.”  Seife’s argument, in short, is the more important one.

The book’s tagline, “The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception,” implies that the book is about a sort of numeric version of truthiness, some sort of number trickery done with intent to mislead.  In fact, the description of various mathematical anti-patterns ends by about page 40.  These are interesting in their own right.  Potempkin numbers are those which are built out of data that only looks like real data, data based on nonsensical or made-up measurements, such as IQ or the crowd estimates taken at free outdoor concerts.   Disestimation is the act of taking numbers more literally than the uncertainty surrounding them would seem to warrant.  (Seife’s example is the museum docent who dates the brontosaurus bones to 65,000,038 years. What’s the point of including the final 38 years when the error margin on such an estimate is likely in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years?)  By page 26, we’re on to fruit-packing and cherry-picking, which refers to the act of ignoring or obscuring the data that fails to support a hypothesis or argument.  The book is already drifting away from mathematics and is onto basic research ethics with 275 pages to go.

Despite the fact that there are the usual warnings here about the pitfalls of overlooking co-variants and making specious correlations that one would see in any tome on statistics, the book isn’t about math.  It’s about numbers. And to Seife, numbers represent powerful disinformation, unfairly persuasive rhetoric.   There is very little statistical depth or discussion of mathematical techniques in this book, other than to say, what is the point of doing statistical slicing and dicing on something that is fictional to begin with?  When Seife explains the concept of margin of error in political polling, which uses statistical formulas to harness some pretty nifty laws of nature in order to determine the amount of random weirdness likely to be in any sample, he doesn’t criticize the math, or even accuse the journalists who cite the polls of being innumerate.  He is more offended by those who accept the mathematical veracity in such a way that they don’t question basic systematic errors in the logic behind the poll’s construction and execution, such as who was sampled or what were they asked and in what way?(p.102)

Particularly revealing of Seife’s lack of concern with actual number manipulation is in his principle of causuistry.  “Casuistry – without the extra ‘u’ – is the art of making a misleading argument through seemingly sound principles.  Causuistry is a specialized form of casuistry where the fault in the argument comes from implying that there is a causal relationship between two things when in fact there isn’t such a linkage.”  He breaks this out as a separate idea from the statistical concept of regression analysis, used to prove causation between multiple independently correlated values. When Seife accuses someone of causuistry he isn’t concerned by the bad math on display, he’s offended by the sheer nerve that someone would try and build an argument out of it.

This gets back to my opening statement.  If the book is to make a lasting contribution outside of journalism or civics (Seife teaches journalism and the book is unfortunately heavy-handed with examples about electoral polling, elections, law and politics.  There are virtually no examples from the world of business or private life), it will require people to start taking this proofiness thesis to heart.  The concept instantly resonated with me.  Numbers, the coldest, hardest facts of all, are twisted and manipulated in order to add an air of proof to some act of data collection.   This touches right to the core of what are the least obvious but most insidious sources of user research failures: those that are related to epistemological hubris and the act of using research to validate ideas rather than to enrich them.

Where research fails most often is when the intent of it is misused.   The more you know about research methodologies, the more aware you are of their inevitable flaws.  The bad researchers are invariably the objectivists, the ones who arrogantly presume to be reporting on reality.   It is in this spirit of hubris that virtually all unforgivable research mistakes are made.     For instance, if you have just conducted a survey and concluded that 85% of potential customers liked your idea for an online information website, I will tell you that you have probably wasted your time.   Most likely your survey was flawed, your sample was flawed, or you created some other sort of systematic error and you cannot make that claim.   You have committed an act of proofiness.   And in the meantime, instead of using that opportunity to talk to your customers to learn something that might enrich your idea (which you always knew you were going to do anyways), you have squandered it trying to convince yourself and others that the idea is less risky than it probably is.   Concentrate on delivering insights, not validation.

Once, I worked as a usability researcher for two arch competitors in the same retailer category at roughly the same time.  Their contrasting styles will always stick with me.  One had a usability manager that emphasized insights.  The other had an old school HCI guy that emphasized Truth (capital T is no accident here) and experimental control.   When interviewing for the first client, I would tell the participant that I didn’t know where this interview was going but I was interested in partnering with them to try and understand what it is like to use this website, how it fits into their life, and how it could be improved.  When interviewing for the second client, I would give the participant a pre-filled out card with a task on it and watch them try and complete the task while somebody from the retailer’s staff timed them in the back room.    I barely opened my mouth for the second client, lest I contaminate the experimental conditions.    The first client had a progressive stance about the research, understood its limitations and was focused on collecting inspiration to refine their design in ways that might resonate with its customer base.  The second client wanted validation only for its existing “agreed upon” design, and set up a priori experimental conditions to get at it.   It is worth noting that for reasons unrelated to this particular usability study, the second client unexpectedly and spectacularly went out of business several years later.  The first one is thriving.   I think it goes to show that proofiness never prospers.

Well, this was definitely the most prolific year of book reading in my life – 61 books.  Many of these were audio books, which a surprising amount of people challenge me about, as if it is not the same as reading.  But as a heavy listener, I have learned to concentrate quite well while being read to through my iPhone headphones.  I think it’s an acquired skill,  because last year I retained a lot less and spaced out a lot when listening to audiobooks.  Now I rarely do.   I listen around 3 hours a day now because of my commute, dog-walking, and exercise regimens.    I also turned back to reading print books again this year, more than ever, since going on a “low information diet” on all things other than books.  No more newspapers or magazines this year and way fewer podcasts and blog posts were consumed.  A couple of insights when reading over the list:

• There are not many design or UX books available on audiobook, which sucks.  That category would be far more populated otherwise.
• My work in science UI this year, particularly chemistry, was an obsession. My reading list shows that.
• I didn’t list my abandoned books here, but they were all fiction.   I only got through 4 works of fiction, 2 of which were extremely short.  I just don’t have much patience for it these days.  The one novel I did inhale was Jonathon Lethem’s Chronic City – which I loved.
• I rely on Audible.com’s sales quite a bit, so my list has some stinkers on it because of that fact.  Just not everything  I really want to read is affordable.
• My favorite book of the year was the Selfish Gene.  It totally changed my understanding of the world and evolution, and is a masterpiece of science writing.  My favorite last year was Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate, and it is clear to me that Dawkins and Pinker are a cut above everybody else in terms of lucid thinking and clear writing style.
• My least favorite book of the year was probably “One Second After” – a post-apocalyptic novel about an ElectroMagnetic Pulse attack on the US.  I should have known I would hate it when I saw that the forward was written by Newt Gingrich.  It’s full of paranoid spirit, gun toting bravado, and a deep sense of American exceptionalism.     It makes it clear that exactly the kind of narrow minds that persecuted Oppenheimer during the “red scare” of the 1950s are still a force in American life.
• I also read endless and overlapping books on innovation and business, some of which were pretty lame.    Avoid the Power of Pull, Changing the Game, Wired to Care,  How Pleasure Works, The Pursuit of Perfect and Drive.   They’re all trying to do the Gladwell thing, and none of them really needed to be written.
• The most mind-blowing books of my year were Biocentrism and the Ego Tunnel, which both make a convincing case that the universe and everything in it is generated by our own perception.
• My other favorites were Good to Great by Jim Collins, a book I’ve quoted almost as much as I did the 4-hour Work Week last year, and Talent is Overrated, which instilled the idea of deliberate practice in me.

Science & Technology

MUST READ: The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins

American Prometheus: The Triumph & Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird & Martin Shirwood

The Science of Formula One Design, by David Tremayne

Proofiness, The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception by Charles Siefe

Don’t be Such a Scientist, by Randy Olson

The Myth of Alzheimers, by Peter J. Whitehouse

MUST READ:  Biocentrism, by Richard Lanza

101 Theory Drive, by Terri McDermott

Endless Forms Most Beautiful, by Sean B. Carroll

The Demon Under the Microscope, by Thomas Hager

Science Matters, by James Trefil, Robert M. Hazen

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson

The Ego Tunnel, by Thomas Metzinger

The Brain that Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge

Particle Physics: a Very Short Introduction, by Frank Close

History, Philosophy & Social Science

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Freidrich Neitzsche

MUST READ: The Philosophy of Freidrich Neitzsche, by H.L. Mencken

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

Intellectuals, by Paul Johnson

The Moral Landscape, by Sam Harris

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, by John McWhorter

The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright

Design, Interaction Design, & Information Science

Box, Bottle, Bag: The World’s Best Packaging Design, by Andrew Gibbs

Information, by Luciano Floridi

Prototyping, by Todd Ziki Warfel

Undercover UX, by Cennydd Boyles & James Boxx

Cognitive Surplus, by Clay Shirky

Business & Innovation

MUST READ: Good to Great, by Jim Collins

Bloomberg by Bloomberg, by Michael Bloomberg

MUST READ: The Death of Capital, by Michael E. Lewitt

Too Big to Fail, by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Brand it Yourself, by Lynn Altmann

Rework, by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

Tribes, by Seth Godin

The Numerati, by Stephen Baker

Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson

The Power of Pull, by John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison

MUST READ: Talent is Overrated, by Geoff Colvin

Wired to Care, by Dev Patnaik

Changing the Game, by David Edery & Ethan Mollick

Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, by Daniel Pink

Fiction

Animal Farm, by George Orwell

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

Chronic City, by Jonathon Lethem

One Second After, by William R. Forstchen

The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson (re-read)

Psychology

The Pursuit of Perfect, by Tal Ben-Shahar

50 Self Help Classics, by Tom Butler-Bowden

The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt

Breakfast with Socrates, by Robert Rowland Smith

Mindfulness, by Ellen J. Langer

How Pleasure Works, by Paul Bloom

Miscellaneous Nonfiction

The Know it All, by A.J. Jacobs

MUST READ: In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan

The Ominvore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

Second Nature, by Michael Pollan

Anti-cancer, by David Servan-Shreiber

The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main Street (33 & 1/3)  by Bill Janovitch

MUST READ: Adventures on the Wine Route, by Kermit Lynch

Open: An Autobiography by Andre Aggassi

Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein

A screen comparing Credit Default Swap prices on the iconic Bloomberg terminal.

I am fascinated with the Bloomberg terminal and its inscrutable interface. To use it is to be at the center of an elite membership of global financerati.  If one of these $1500 a month machines is on your desk, for your exclusive use, it is a sign of your arrival. Everything about its physical presence communicates its primary affordance, exclusivity. The outward appearance, which has changed little since the introduction of the original “Bloomberg Box” in the early 1980s, seems to say you’re probably too stupid to even use me. But if I’m on your desk, then you, my friend, are one serious cat.

Perhaps my personal fascination stems from my six years working at Reuters, who, along with Dow Jones, invented the market for real-time computerized financial data only to watch themselves become marginalized by Bloomberg on one side (the high end of the market) and Thomson on the other  (the low end of the market.)  In the mid-1990s if you had a Reuters terminal on your desk you were probably a retail equities trader in Omaha, not a swinging dick, master-of-the-universe type in New York or London.  This competitive weakness, which led to severe troubles at the company, affected me personally.   As I was being laid off in 2003, along with my entire department, I am certain that I muttered Damn you, Bloomberg! more than once.

This Bloomberg terminal is available for public use at La Guardia airport.

I also live in New York City, where the billionaire founder of the company, Michael Bloomberg, went on to become our iconoclastic and effective three term mayor.  His long reign has overlapped with practically my entire tenure here, and it’s hard to argue that he has been anything short of a windfall for the world’s most ungovernable city. This second act incarnation as a hyper-competent public reformer only deepens my interest in the factor behind his original success.   His fortune, with his Bermuda weekend place and his helicopters and his Upper Eastside townhouse, was built on the back of this clumsy black retro terminal with its arcane devotion to keyboard shortcuts and an MS-DOS era interface.

But really, when I think about it most deeply,  I’m obsessed with the insidious aura of the machine itself.  It was  at the center of every last one of the financial calamities that have marked the past decade.  The machine stands as an enduring reminder that some of the best and brightest brains of our generation have squandered their talent in the pursuit of ruinous financial engineering.  To think of the sheer number of credit default swaps, sub-prime MBSs, and other troubled asset crapola that traded hands as people were staring at this interface is truly astounding. Sure, that’s like blaming the axe for the bloody killing spree, but think about it.  There were many, many players and personalities involved in the “systemic” nature of the financial crisis,  but the Bloomberg was always in the room.

It's not difficult to find pictures of devastated looking traders in front of their Bloomberg terminals circa 2008, at the height of the financial crisis. This one is from the NY Times.

I have tried to use a Bloomberg terminal only once.  It was set-up in the departure lounge at La Guardia airport for one of the shuttle flights between New York and Boston.   I was traveling with Mark Safire, my first mentor in this field, on the way somewhere to conduct a usability study for a client.  We started playing with the terminal and, after about a minute, were giggling and cracking jokes about it.  Others, whose job it was not to make fun of obscurantism in the design of computer interfaces, probably would not have been amused (intimidated, more likely).   Bloomberg apologists would surely be unconcerned by our ridicule.  In fact, I can imagine them leaning back in their chairs, ordering another bottle of Vosne Romanee, and toasting the fact that the plebes are still unaware of the true power of the machine.

The only valid reason explaining why the Bloomberg design will not change is the behavior of its users. Users who favor complexity and clutter over efficiency and clarity to sustain a fictive status symbol.  – UX Magazine

The last time I was this disoriented in front of a computer was when I was 14 playing the adventure game, Zork, on my Apple IIc.   The Zork interface, which was nothing but a command line prompt, required a user to type in text commands and then see what would happen.  In Zork, I eventually had to draw my own map on a sheet of notebook paper so I could retain a mental model of the game’s environment somewhere outside of my own short-term memory.  With my home-grown navigational aid, I transformed the tacit into the explicit, and I was forced to do this completely outside of the context of the product and its design.   The Bloomberg also relies on a lot of external context development for successful use.  Some of this context comes in the form of the training workshops, extensive help resources, or the on-screen cheat sheets that the company provides.  The proprietary keyboard design, with its custom hard-keys that are a necessary part of most user interactions, is another non-UI technique to put usage queues out there “in the world.”  Most knowledge on how to use the Bloomberg is developed, Zork-like, over time, within the mind of the user by sheer trial and error.   To learn to master the Bloomberg on a Wall Street trading floor is part of the testosterone-fueled, gamified climate of the place.  It is not difficult to find Bloomberg users who use the term “addiction” when talking about how they feel about using it.  If it was made any easier to use, say with a cutesy “point and click” interface, graphics, white-space, readable typography, careful use (versus garish use) of contrast, or any other attempt at “user-friendliness,” then the whole point of the thing is at risk.    It’s like a scratch golfer who favors a forged iron blade over one of those big cast aluminum blades like Ping first introduced in the 1980s.  The sweet spot is the size of a dime on the forged club but the expert golfer considers it to be purpose-built, and therefore superior, to the club that’s designed to be more forgiving for those who never learned to swing the thing in the first place.

Look no further than NASA's Mission Control to see the source of the Bloomberg's screen design cues. It is the look of serious people doing serious business.

A heatmap visualization of oil prices in the U.S. on a Bloomberg Terminal. The look is right out of a spy movie.

The reflective aspects of the Bloomberg’s design success are well understood.  When IDEO redesigned the terminal, celebrity make-over style, for the magazine Portfolio in 2007, they acknowledged the fact that customers prided themselves on their ability to navigate the complex machines and went so far as to work in a game-like system where users’ expertise was tracked and displayed publicly to other users. (Note: this design was passed on by Bloomberg L.P. and never saw the light of day.)  Jakob Nielsen, interviewed for the same article, praised the terminal for its flexibility in letting users configure their screens into “data dumps” – useful for scanning and pattern recognition – but dismissed other aspects of the design such as its use of black backgrounds and contrasty yellow or orange text and graphic colors.   But as you can see if you look at my post on F1 Telemetry interfaces, the black background on terminal-style interfaces is an established idiom in serious “engineering” cultures where real-time, data centric analysis is high-stakes business.  This look and feel is clearly cultivated, and If you want to know where it originates, bringing to bear the full emotional and dramatic weight of serious people conducting serious business, look no further than NASA’s mission control.   Finance may not be exactly “engineering,” but in our modern world of quantitative trading and complex derivatives, I doubt anybody ever looked over someone’s shoulder who is using a Bloomberg terminal and said “Dude, this isn’t rocket science.”  These days, it more or less is.

The IDEO redesign of the Bloomberg Terminal that was done for a feature in Portfolio Magazine in 2007.

Bloomberg’s early advantage in the market data terminal business was in the proprietary analytics built-in to the terminal, particularly for bond traders, not in the real-time “ticker” information.   Real-time price data was, and remains, a commodity.    It’s the capability of using it for value-added analysis, and perhaps the perception of being purpose-built for analysis, that really makes this thing sing.  When Bloomberg users cite reasons for why they love their machine, they define it as the very essence of usability, not complexity.   In fact, its weaknesses from a design perspective are often the very elements that the users praise.   Its contrasty interface is lauded for the ability to be started at for hours upon hours with minimal eyestrain.   The keyboard shortcuts are viewed as some sort of advanced “help” system.  Read this blog post, 6 reasons I love my Bloomberg, to see what I mean.   The best design choices in the Bloomberg, like the integrated 24/7 real-time help that’s available by pressing a function key, are what most people in my profession would consider anti-design choices.  But users are cultish in their devotion to Bloomberg exactly because of these sorts of features.   Let’s face it, these people know their audience.   The Bloomberg terminal’s branding success was in being able to successfully position itself as something developed by a trader, for traders.   The fact that the terminal’s functionality and design reinforces this message down to the last keystroke is why it belongs in the emotional design hall of fame.

Further Reading from Around the Web:

Screen Gems,  Portfolio Magazine

The Impossible Bloomberg Makeover,  UX Magazine

Educational media that works: the wacky wine manga, Kami no Shizuku

Shizuku is approachable, a bit scruffy and rebellious, but with a pedigree inherited from his deep family roots in the wine business. He is modeled after Bordeaux. Issei inherits his personality from Burgundy – tight and complex, arrogant, and, well, ok let’s just say it – anal. These are the dueling protagonists in the Japanese wine themed comic – Kami no Shizuku. This is a wine nerd’s fantasy, a place where a cultured young lad can score babes with a bit of daredevil decanting.  Yes, that’s right – decanting – as in pouring wine out of the bottle in which it was shipped into another vessel for aeration purposes.  It’s also known for it’s passionate descriptions of drinking wine and it’s off-kilter tasting analogies.  The comic series is so insanely popular in Japan and Korea that the wines it mentions sell out immediately.  It has even been remade as a very popular television program in Japan.  Kami targets young-ish men (mostly) and women, many of whom are in their thirties, with the express goal of educating them on the basics of being an insufferable old-world wine snob.  And it works!  While your average American in their thirties doesn’t know their left bank from their right bank (I’m talking about the Gironde river in Bourdeaux, of course, which I admit, I had to look up), young people in Japan and Korea are forking over $1000 euro for a bottle of Chateau Le Puy and reviving a whole export business in fancy French wines.    Obtaining a copy of this manga has become my obsession – but unfortunately I don’t read Japanese. So what to do? Spend hours with a Kanji dictionary just to experience a 2001 Chateau Mont Perat compared to the ’sweet and husky’ voice of Queen lead singer, Freddy Mercury?

When Issei decants, every head turns.

His decanting is not only delicate and courageous....

It's also magnificent and jaw-dropping.

The manga market in the US & UK is focused primarily on minors, who legally aren’t allowed to experience a ‘99 Richebourg in “full bloom” even if they could manage Shizuku’s high-wire aerial decanting technique – so it’s no wonder there are no plans in the works for an official published version in the English speaking world. Only one option remains if you want to read this in English translation… enter the nerdy counter-culture of online comic book traders and find a “scanlation” (or unauthorized translated copy.) A while back, I asked some friends at Del Ray Manga to clue me into a couple of scan sites that have a taste of Kami no Shizuku in English. One’s called mangafox.com and the other is called ncismanga.net. Mangafox has the first two volumes in a very easy to access format – the pages render in large, crisp images directly in the browser with no annoying logging in or downloading involved.  By the time I check out Ncismanga, they have their download links disabled and are indicating one must use IRC to find and download the files, a technology not used in my house since the TRS-80 went on the fritz.   (On my own, I am able to find five subtitled segments of the popular Japanese TV version, with English subtitles, that are available at Iron Chevsky’s wine blog.)  Mangafox hosts informal page scans that are translated by an online community of “scanlators”, who edit and upload the various pages.  The site has over a million daily visitors and 400,000 registered members.  Every once in a while, they take down a block of copyrighted material when a publisher complains loudly enough – but this is clearly a thriving world and it is unclear whether the manga publishers are troubled enough about it’s existence to do anything about it.  (note: OneManga, a large competitive site, was recently shut down under pressure from publishers so the times they are a’changing)

Scanlation sites have informally translated copies of manga on them that are provided by a passionate community, but it is unclear whether publishers are concerned by the existence of these sites.

Ok. First lesson learned when it comes to reading manga translations – they make a lot more sense if you remember to read from right to left (although, this being Japanese pop culture… not as much as you’d think.) In anime circles – of which I admittedly didn’t know existed until now – scanlations have a reputation for sloppy translations, particularly when it comes to the more subtle cultural references and idioms.   However, such awkward translations (if any) only add to the giddy delight and weirdness of reading Kami no Shizuku.  For instance, when our hero feels “sick in the back-teeth” from all the blathering from his annoying parents, it contributes cultural terroir to the story. I’m a wine guy, but it turns out that loads of people rightfully enjoy this as a pure manga experience – even without a strong interest in it’s wine aspects. It has great art, a fun story line with dramatic tension, and even though it doesn’t have a lot of shonen (exaggerated martial arts style action), or fan service (POV style panty shots and other non-plot related sexual inferences), it’s surprisingly physical and in the spirit of the genre, especially given it’s fussy subject matter.

The plot is centered on Shizuku and Issei tracking down twelve great bottles of wine that will unlock the keys to the kingdom – which in this case is their deceased father’s priceless wine collection. The plot unfolds with compelling twists and turns, but never hesitates to slow down and linger on the great delights of the wine itself. Long sequences of detailed sniffing, swirling, and ecstatic facial expressions accompany most of the wine sequences – which are based on real wines with real vintages. Despite the dated, and franco-philiac!, nature of their particular breed of wine snobbery, the characters show great emotion and reverence for the godly liquids they imbibe – and refreshingly never resort to a Parker-style rating system. It’s this sort of enthusiasm that does exactly what a lot of wine criticism fails to do  – puts the fun back into talking about wine. If wine is nothing else, it’s a rich mileau for storytelling, full of colorful characters and locations – which is captured perfectly here.  It is this enthusiasm and iconoclastic passion that makes Kami No Shizuku stand as an unlikely educational success story.

R/GA's main corporate website has a radical design in information architecture terms, which it hides in plain sight.

Dave Malouf coined a prescient phrase in the title of a recent blog post regarding the design of websites.  It’s not really a page anymore, but more of a stage. “Like the real stage itself,” he wrote, “we can create sub-stages where sub-dominant contexts have great significance and focus if only but for a short while, while contextually relevant to the whole.”  This is a tidy way of characterizing the very essence of the RIA movement, and an excellent conceptual framework for understanding the information architecture of the post-page web.   Web designers have traditionally constructed virtual buildings, not narratives, out of information – with pages as their rooms and sitemaps and breadcrumbs as their planning tools and system of wayfinders. But this is changing fast and stagecraft is soon to become a key skill of all employed web IAs.

Perhaps the most subtle and clear evidence of this shift towards the modal and the temporal over the structural is in the interactive agency, R/GA’s, corporate website.  This site looks absolutely basic.  Mostly white space and type, it fetishizes a simpler time and a simpler web.  In fact, it is the anti-R/GA site, avoiding just the types of bells and whistles the agency dishes out for it’s high-end clients like Nike, Nokia, and HBO.  There is no fancy photography, no use of animations, not a single gradient fill or rounded corner, not one lightbox overlay, and – perhaps a first for an R/GA design – no homepage carousel.   In fact, its fanciest interaction is that most old-school of all in-page transitions – the anchor-link.

The site is comprised of one large home page that scrolls under a fixed upper pane where the navigation lives. All interior pages are launched modally from this page.

Yet, on my first visit, I overlooked the subtle charms of the site.  In fact, it took me a minute of poking around to realize the site has no persistent global navigation that extends to it’s interior pages (unless you ask for it by hovering over the logo in the upper left), no breadcrumbs to keep a user oriented, and not even category pages!  It is simply one long home page, divided into sections that are scrollable via a set of links in a fixed upper pane over a scrollable body.  From this home page, one launches the site’s content one sub-dominant context at a time.

This design is simple enough that it feels radical in this day and age.  In fact, I can’t imagine one of their fancy brand clients agreeing to it, which must be why they dogfooded the design for their own company website. Yet it is surprisingly satisfying to use, with it’s subtle animated transitions adding true delight – perhaps because they are used so sparingly.  I have one minor critique – which is that the X’s used to close out of modal pages are more of a designer’s artifice than something a user would understand.  The X is too large to suggest a familiar window control, it occurs too far to the right, and though it looks cool, it takes too long to realize that the page is indeed modal.  Overall, this is a great design, hiding in plain site.

All content is launched modally. Notice the lack of persistent global navigation, encouraging the user to close out and return to previous context.

Even list pages are launched modally. Which allows for the unusual modal-on-modal if a user opens a news item from here.

Such an "anti-design" for a fancy agency serves a purpose - it makes the client work look that much more striking in the case study area of the site.

The First Key to Success – Counting to One

Like design, branding involves creating an illusion of clarity out of that which is fundamentally indeterminate.   Whether you are publishing a blog or building iPhone apps, you are looking for a singular, but simple and strong, idea at the center.  Or to put it Altman’s terms, you should learn to count to one.   “We don’t buy a shampoo that doubles as a face wash and a hand soap,” she writes.  Consumers want to believe, whether it is true or not, that “certain brands and certain products perform best at certain tasks.”   Domino’s Pizza built their mega-brand on a single promise – delivery in under 30 minutes.  There was no mention of whether the pizza was also delicious.  Less successfully, Advil tried to position their product to the marketplace with two core benefits. Fast. Strong. Advil. “Do you remember that campaign?” Altman asks.  “Of course you don’t.  Neither does anyone else.”

Practicing this sort of reductionism is harder than it sounds.  Odds are that your product or website does more than one thing well, or at least that you want it to.  For instance, if you think your express passport service is both easy and fast, you will be hard-pressed to give up one of those benefits.  You may make the mistake of naming your service ABC Passport Express as a result.  “ABC” connotes easiness and guarantees good phone book placement (a valuable business benefit before Google came along in 1997), and “express” sounds fast.  Good, right?  No, in fact, because you will probably  lose out to your more focused competition, RushMyPassport.com, who commits to the single benefit of fast turnaround.  Being perceived as having one clear benefit usually wins the battle for the prospect’s mind – which is all that matters.

The name, "ABC Passport Express," simultaneously promises ease and speed of service, not to mention the benefits of being local area specialists as captured in their tagline. The result is generic.

RushMyPassport.com focuses on one core promise, speed of turnaround time, and creates a coordinated impression that this is what they do - get you your passport fast.

The Second Key to Success – Work Fast and Loose (at least at the beginning)

Ok. So now you can count to one, but how do you arrive at the right one? The most sure-fire way is to start with the many.  Ideas are cheap, so you should generate lots of them, and you should do it fast.   The design firm IDEO, more famous for their brainstorming methods than any other design firm in history, once re-designed that most familiar and time-tested of objects, the supermarket shopping cart, in only 5 days.   “Maybe we should acknowledge it’s kind of insane to do an entire project in just a week,” said Peter Skillman of IDEO, as their team proceeded to do exactly that – on national television!   The project was done in response to a challenge set forth by the producer’s of ABC’s television news magazine, Nightline, in 1999. One of IDEO’s key premises is to throw lots and lots of ideas out in the early phases – then cull them down to the key ideas later. In The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley shares the IDEO brainstorming rules which are written on the wall during brainstorming sessions there. Go for Quantity. Encourage Wild Ideas. Be Visual. And always, always – work fast and loose in the early stages, because winning ideas will get refined in the later stages.  And, guess what? Winning ideas can come from anywhere, so generate lots of them!

And if we return to the Brandmaker Express method that Altman writes about in her book, we will find an approach for generating names and taglines that is very much in the spirit of IDEO.   For each naming challenge, Altman and her team design a set of creative workshop exercises to generate lots and lots of ideas.   The workshops are run twice, once with the employees and internal stakeholders at the client company, and once with a team of ‘creative souls’ (an eclectic group of creative professionals who do this as a moonlighting gig.)  The workshop games are developed on a custom basis for each product being named, but there are a few favorites which appear over and over.  For instance, to generate tagline ideas there is usually an exercise to write an attention-grabbing headline like you might find in a famous publication, but the publication that serves as a setting is varied based on the tone of the product (e.g. NY Daily News for “sensational” headlines, NY Times for straightforward and sophisticated.)  Then she might add another exercise to push the creativity further, such as “Now in Three Words,” where the headline has to be compressed to it’s 3-word essence.  There are also specific exercises for arriving at names, such as “Word Smash,” which involves taking two English words that fit the concept and shoving them together to make a nonsense word – like Celebrex or MaxiPro. The point with these games is to do lots of them, coming at your naming challenge from several angles.  As you are doing the exercises, you should be furiously writing down the things that your brainstormers are saying in response to the challenge.

The Third Key to Success – Synthesize the ideas into a few powerful concepts, then visualize them

My favorite part of working with Altman is when the professional graphic designer she hires comes back with about 20 full-color 10 by 14 print-style ads with names, taglines, and corresponding imagery.  This is where the ideas from the brainstorming are synthesized and come to life, and this is also the appropriate time to critique the ideas and vote on them as a group.  The book has many insights on how to get to the right 20.  For instance, find out the dealbreakers early.  Maybe your CEO hates purple so there is no use in developing the purple people eater concept that someone threw out in one of the brainstorming exercises.  Concision is essential.   You should develop taglines that could tell the story of the site (along with a name and a logo) if everything else on the page was removed.  And she provides several known pitfalls that lead to writing bad, consumer alienating taglines.  Rampant use of the gerund, e.g. using a verb with no subject and adding “ing” to the end, as in Nokia’s “connecting people,” is a big no-no.   Altman calls this kind of tone “self-congratulatory, self-praising, and seriously superior.”  She also likes second person taglines, not first person.  Telling your customer what you are trying to do in a first person tagline is not the point (e.g. Lucent’s “creating value through true convergence.”)   Second person taglines, like “you deserve a break today,” bring the customer into the brand’s narrative.

Lynn Altman uses print-style ads, along the lines of this one for monster.com, to present name and tagline concepts.

So by now, I hope you’re convinced that it’s time to think like a marketer, not a business development person or -god forbid- a designer, when you are naming and positioning websites.  Don Norman, in a recent interview in upstart UX magazine, Want, said outright that the distinction between designers and marketers is really very small.  They both ask the same question, “How do we make it so that people will enjoy the product?”  And if you are wondering who is more creative – marketers of designers? – you should sit in on one of Brand Now’s creatives-only brainstorming sessions and you will realize that we are indeed talking about two sides of the same coin.

Think of a homepage as something a user takes in at 65mph. (photo credit: Andrew Canion)

Increasingly users think of the homepage as that place where the search box lives. Web analytics data bears this out. A typical homepage, particularly if there is a large and diverse set of products or information on a site, will see a vast majority of it’s clicks consolidated around the global navigation and search box. If you think of a user flying by your homepage at 65 mph on their way to the search box, then how much information are they likely to take in? How can you make a statement about the value of your site that a user can tune in out of the corner of their eye? The best homepages confront this behavioral reality and offer the same concise, impactful designs as those on highway billboards.

Related Posts on SolidStateUX:

Don’t Fight Over the Homepage

The dashboard that monitors what the driver is doing, not the machine.

Ok, so I admit that I have a tendency to overvalue the impact of my own profession.  I believe Malcom McCullough when he says that interaction design is likely to be one of the great liberal arts of the 21st century.  The great American novel, when it finally arrives, will be planned in Omnigraffle.  And the fact that most of us deploy our tradecraft in the service of streamlining the movie rental process, selling sunglasses or laminate flooring, facilitating the sharing of snapshots and how-to articles on pumpkin carving does not diminish our greatness.  In fact, in my world, interaction designers are likely to be key players in all forms of meaningful societal change from here on in.   (Just try and tell me that Obama’s website wasn’t pivotal in his election!)  But what role does I.D. have in making the planet greener?  Even I struggled with that one.

For industrial designers, who work with physical products that consume materials both in their manufacture and their ongoing usage, the links to sustainable design principles are clear.  But for information product designers whose work is consumed primarily on screens, a claim to designing ’sustainably’ often feels like a stretch.  What is being conserved – pixels? CPU cycles? Yet recently I am learning that I need not feel that way.  It turns out there are many designers who leverage interactivity to directly make the world a more livable place – not only by raising awareness of sustainable principles but by directly affecting the way people use and think about their environment on a day-to-day basis.  On Nov. 12, while hosting a panel discussion on sustainability and interaction design for NYCUPA, I met Ted Booth – Director of Interaction Design at Smart Design.  Smart collaborated with IDEO in researching and designing the SmartGuage with EcoGuide for client, Ford – a true example of the unique power of interaction design to change human behavior.

The 2010 Ford Fusion is one of the first models to ship with the new SmartGuage desing in place.

The Ford SmartGuage with EcoGuide is an innovative instrument cluster (a reinterpreted automobile dashboard if you will)  for a new line of Ford hybrid cars.   IDEO did the user research, at the heart of which was an ethnographic look at the world of hybrid owners – including the cult-like “Hypermilers” who make a fetish out of squeezing every last drop of fuel efficiency out of their machines.  Smart did the design work itself.   The 2010 Ford Fusion is among the first models to hit the market with the new dashboard in place and immediately garnered considerable press and recognition for the novel philosophy behind it’s design (see further reading links at the end of this post.)   The  instrument panel design is purely digital, essentially one integrated monitor built into the car’s dash.   Being screen-based enables some interesting affordances that are perfect for a dual-engine automobile, for instance truly modal displays.   The tachometer toggles into “EV mode” when the electric motor is running, which makes sense given that electric motors don’t speak the language of “RPM’s,” and being modal allows the two gauges to share the same piece of real estate in the display.   The dash even has a tutorial mode that shows descriptive help text next to each type of instrumentation, seriously threatening the future existence of 10th grade drivers ed teachers.

A modal tachometer displays in typical RPM mode when the combustion engine is running, then toggles into a differently scaled "EV" mode when the electric motor is running.

What’s most profoundly innovative about the SmartGuage design is that it turns the traditional role of a car’s driver interface exactly on it’s head.  “A guiding principle was to give the driver feedback about their driving,” Booth told me in the pre-interview for our panel discussion.   “Up to now, car dashboards have communicated information about what the machine is doing, not the driver.”    The reason behind the shift in emphasis is a simple business problem.  Many hybrid purchasers, who are socio-politically predisposed to choosing such cars for their green benefits, are unhappy customers.  They just aren’t getting the increased fuel mileage they hoped for.  Some aren’t getting anything near the optimal mileage recorded by the test drivers and car reviewers.  It turns out a lot of this has to do with the way one drives a hybrid.

The Prius dashboard shows how much energy is recaptured by braking, but the display reinforces a misperception that braking harder is better.

How hard one brakes, for instance, is a key variable.    Hybrids, as many know, recharge their batteries through the principle of regenerative braking – a process of recapturing the kinetic energy generated by braking and storing it for later use rather than dissipating it in the form of heat.     The energy can be stored mechanically in the form of compressed air or a flywheel (as the high end KERS systems in Formula One racing cars do), or electrically in a capacitor or battery (as regular consumer hybrids do).  It is standard procedure in a hybrid dashboard to inform the driver about how much power has been regenerated.  But according to Booth, the existing instrument design gave drivers a mistaken perception about how to brake in order to maximize that number.  “Existing gauges show a spike of energy when a driver brakes,” he said, “which actually makes drivers think they should wait until the last minute to brake so they can brake harder and increase the amplitude of the spike.  In fact, it’s the opposite… slow steady braking delivers more of a charge, so we factored this into our design.”

It’s one thing to communicate to the driver a complex set of information about their driving and quite another to do that in a way that they can process – especially while trying to keep their eyes on the road!  The Smart design team did a couple of novel things here with the design.  The most famous is the use of a simple metaphor to give the driver an almost game-like sense of optimizing their driving performance – the “efficiency leaves.”    Initially worried that the leaves metaphor was going to be skewered by the car reviewers, it turned out to be exactly the opposite.

The hardest thing was to process all the inputs that affect fuel economy and feed them into a display in a way that a driver can process. We came up with the metaphor of leaves… drivers earn leaves as they conserve fuel. – Ted Booth, Smart Design

Smart Guage uses bold visual and information design to create highly "glanceable" instruments.

The team also focused on a bold, clear information design that embraced the limitation of “look-away” time – which implies that drivers have less then a second to safely take something in before returning their eyes to the road.   The fuel gauge, for instance, abandons the traditional needle design for a boldly rendered bar-graph that looks at first glance like amber liquid.   The leaves themselves represent an easily glanced at indication of driving success, but can be toggled into a more detailed mode showing feedback in the form of hard numbers.

Few examples better illustrate the centrality of the UX trade – and the potential opportunity to affect change for the better in places we never thought of- than this reinvention of the car dashboard.   These are heady, exciting times to be in the business of designing screens.

Further Reading:

Ford’s SmartGauge Improves Fuel Efficiency Through Better Instrument Design Fast Company

Experience designers who work in digital media such as RIAs, video games, and DVD menus are already well conditioned to thinking beyond the page as a metaphor for organizing information structures. But paper itself is not the villain. In fact, paper can be transformed into all sorts of interesting interactive possibilities – including graceful and surprising transitions, progressive disclosure of information, impactful visuals, and above all, a compelling and satisfying simplicity.

1. Relocation Card, by Clay Porter Bell

In this playful RSVP card, the message “Please pop round for drinks” is a double entendre. “Pop ’round” are the casual brit invitation words, but also the die-cut circular window literally pops around to reveal a simple, witty reply form.

2. Matisse Picasso Exhibition Invitation by Salterbaxter

Concertina folds can create complex and playful transitions in paper. Here the faces of the artists are cut-up and spliced together, with the individual faces appearing only when the card is held upright and obliquely.

3. Discovery Networks Europe Mailer by Salterbaxter

Double gatefold panels fold in symmetrically to meet in the middle. The reveal here is delightful, with the choice of transition perfectly reinforcing the message of using the service to gain surprising reach.

4. Invitation for Smiths of Smithfield by Rodney Fitch

Here the simple use of a die-cut “cowhide” cover sleeve is evocative of a layer mask in Photoshop.

5. Tri-Ply’s Right Triangle Box by Nicepond

Packaging designers use the term close-packing to describe shapes designed to fit together on retail shop floors. In this great design the spines are embellished with index images of the object inside on one orientation, and a bold decorative pattern on another.

6. Rabih Hage Invitation by Hat-trick

Another double-gatefold transition, but used here to create a sense of depth and perspective in an invite for an interior design company. Looking through the cut-out rectangle helps to reinforce the illusion of an elegant room.

7. Altus Promotional Booklet by Andrew MacPhee

The muse for many interactive paper designers is no doubt the pop-up book. Here the designer uses restraint to show the power of breaking out of 2D planes to focus attention and give potential condo buyers a feeling of living above it all.

8. Skin Jewellery packaging by J. Maskrey/Artomatic

Transparent overlays are used here in the paper equivalent of a film-maker’s rack focus. Controlling the ‘depth of field’ via use of shifting focus is a cunning way to draw the user through an interactive narrative.

9. Animated wine label by Elhombredelalata

A clever low tech animation leverages one of the wine bottle’s great built-in affordances – it’s ability to be spun.

10. Nexus DVD Reel Packaging by Julia

A truly sustainable design, this DVD’s case is also it’s mailer. It’s clever zip opening gives the user the satisfying feeling of opening a package that comes in the mail, without any of the fuss – or mess!

Further Reading on Solid State UX:

10 More Great Interaction Designs – in Cut and Folded Paper

Sources:

Luke Herriott’s “The Packaging and Design Templates Sourcebook.”

Natalie Avella ’s Paper Engineering (Revised and Extended)3-D design techniques for a 2-D material

Smashing Magazine’s June, 2008 post Beautiful Brochures and Booklets

And, finally, the amazing packaging blog at The Dieline.com and their great new book:

Box Bottle Bag : the world’s best packaging design

The September, 2009 Issue of Wired

For several years now, I’ve been showing a screen capture of the craigslist.org home page to audiences at various presentations on usability.   I ask a simple question.   Is this website usable?   The audience members, who are generally students, programmers and business people and not members of the design community, invariably return a resounding yes in response to my question.  It’s taken for granted.  Craigslist, in all it’s glorious straightforwardness, defines usable.  Then I proceed to show them how the design breaks a lot of rules – at least by the conventional wisdom of modern web UI designers.   For instance, the craigslist home page is crammed full and almost completely lacks any sense of visual heirarchy or prioritization.   It provides little to no opportunity for serendipitous discovery of content, only myriad starting options for those who already know what they are looking for.   It’s chock-full of cryptic abbreviations.  It’s un-visual.  It squanders precious screen real-estate on seldom used features.  For instance, a full third of the screen is devoted to displaying all the cities where the various Craigslists are located – something which the average user rarely, if ever,  has the need to change.  Let’s face it, this site  is a usability train wreck, right?

Well, few people think so.  In fact, most think the opposite.   The September issue of Wired hits the newstands soon and the cover story is called “The Tragedy of Craigslist.” The article is a fascinating take on the world’s greatest anti-brand and the Forest Gump-like savants who run it.  But at the heart of the piece is a condemnation of Craigslist’s stubborn refusal to evolve it’s UI design and functionality.   “On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can’t easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent.”    The job postings are a “wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings.”  The author, Gary Wolf, rightfully acknowledges craiglist.org’s role as a cultural force and community asset.  Indeed, he’s almost offended that the People’s greatest online resource is so stuck in 1995.   Don’t the plebes deserve better?   Wired goes so far as to commission four “extreme makover” redesigns of the Craigslist homepage by top designers, including a team from Obama’s site and one from the NYTimes.com.     All in all, it’s a great piece of writing, and the makeover feature is a lot of fun and I hope they make it a regular feature.   After all, serious criticism of UI is rare compared to other cultural works such as books or movies, and I’m thrilled to see it here.

Most People Consider This Highly Usable. Why?

But they missed the point of why the site works in the first place.  It’s anti-design is no accident at this point.  In fact it’s carefully curated as the Craigslist “brand.”   This design screams utilitarian “grass roots” community content that’s built from the ground up.   The fact that there is not a professional designer within a 1000 miles of the place is exactly where the site’s authority comes from – and Craig Newmark knows this.   The site was already comparitavely underdesigned when it was launched in it’s modern incarnation in 1998.  The results of that exercise that I do in my presentations would seem to indicate that the branding works.  This site is perceived as more usable than almost anything else out there.    This gap between how a user values something because it suits their behavior and how they value it because it hits them on a contemplative, reflective level is at the heart of modern user experience design.  Don Norman sounded the call to think this way in Emotional Design, and here’s a great example of the reflective aspects of good design in play.   If Craigslist adopted one of the makeover designs in the magazine article they might be dead in the water (although I must admit the contestants showed great restraint and stayed more or less true to the “brand.”)  Another example of a product like this is the Bloomberg terminal – a usability nightmare of dense screens and arcane keyboard shortcuts whose users define their self-worth and status in their Wall St. milieu based on their ability to use it.    Somewhere in portraying the Craigslist guys as the Internet’s biggest Neanderthals, they seem to have missed the point that the end result is pure UX genius.