“There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth.  We literally see the world the way we want to see it.  But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that.  Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it.  Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it.   We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

via The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is Part 1 – Opinionator Blog – NYTimes.com.

I write at least one post a week. Does that take discipline? Sure. But when I break it down, the hardest part — the part for which I need the discipline — is sitting down to write. I’ll find all sorts of things to distract me from starting. But if I can get myself to start a post, I don’t need much discipline to finish it.

This is my experience as well. I spend lots of time noodling over whether or not to sit down and write. I’ll wonder when I’m going to do it, I’ll schedule my weekend morning so that it has writing time. I spend a lot of time doing this…way more than necessary.

But once I’ve started I’ve got momentum. It’s the sitting down that’s the hard part…where most of my consternation comes in. I think this is why some of the best thinkers had daily rituals…so they could spend less time planning and more time doing.

Bregman’s solution to moments in which to make decisions?

“Schedule them. Create an established time to second-guess yourself, a time when you know your commitment won’t be weakened by the temptations of the moment. If you’re going to break the diet, do it when your need for willpower is at its lowest. Decide to decide the next day, maybe after a healthy breakfast or a little exercise, when you know your inclination to stick to your goals will be naturally high.

via How (And When) to Motivate Yourself – Peter Bregman – Harvard Business Review.

It also amuses me when people talk about two things in particular with regard to the iPhone and iPad. First, how much better some companies’ iPhone apps are than their web sites, as if the company is somehow so much more gifted at creating iPhone apps than web pages. It feels better because it’s designed for you to do things quickly. Most web sites are actually not designed for speed of task completion at all. They are designed to maximize page views or at the very least, time on site (and hence, maximize revenue). ESPN.com doesn’t want you reading one story about the Mayweather/Mosley fight and then moving on with your day. They want you to read ten more stories after that, check your fantasy teams, and buy a Seahawks jersey. Mobile.espn.com, on the other hand, is more concerned with getting you in and out quickly because they know you have less tolerance for distraction and extraneous clicks when you’re on your phone. The second thing is when people talk about how great content looks in some of these iPad apps. Again, this is a reaction to the lack of distraction, not the tablet form factor.

via A good problem to have | Mike Industries.

“Once upon a time, Facebook could be used simply to share your interests and information with a select small community of your own choosing. As Facebook’s privacy policy once promised, ‘No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.’

How times have changed.

Today, Facebook removed its users’ ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users’ profiles, ‘including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests’ will now be transformed into ‘connections,’ meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don’t want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them.”

This is not good for users at all. This is Facebook making decisions that are clearly in their own best interests and NOT in the best interests of their users. And, frankly, this continues Facebook’s bad behavior regarding privacy. I’m completely blown away by their bullshit rhetoric around “connecting to everything you care about”.

On second thought, though, should we be surprised? At this point it is clear that Mark Zuckerberg & Co. doesn’t care about user privacy. From Facebook Beacon (see Facebook’s Brilliant but Evil Design) to the story of how Facebook was founded, it is abundantly clear that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t give a damn about rights to privacy.

Image by Paul Adams (screenshot hosted on Flickr)

“But the reality is, social networks rarely add to our number of connections. We’ve already met almost all the people we’re connected to on social networks. We’re already connected to these people offline. Social networks simply make the connections visible. For example, we often connect with old school friends, and catch up over a couple of wall posts. But rarely do we continue the conversation once we’ve connected, and over time we forget that the connections exist. In fact, Facebook users often have no interactions with up to 50% of their connections.1 When we study how people are interacting on social networks, we see that most interactions are with a very small subset of the people we’re connected to.

The average number of friends on Facebook is 130, and many users have many more. Yet despite having hundreds of friends, most people on Facebook only interact regularly with 4 to 7 people, and for 90% of Facebook users, 20% of their friends account for 70% of all interactions. We also see this with phone usage. We have hundreds of people in our phone contacts, yet 80% of phone calls are made to the same 4 people. We know dozens of people who use Skype, yet 80% of Skype calls are made to 2 people. Even when people play computer games online, they mostly play with people they know offline.”

This is important data, as it grounds the social interaction/UX designer in the reality that most people aren’t doing anything crazy online, they’re mostly cultivating and managing the relationships they had offline.

Paul then digs deep into what he calls temporary ties, those people we meet only quickly for some relatively important reason. I really like temporary ties as an extension of strong and weak ties because it suggests clear use cases to design for. When designing for those situations in which two people want to interact but have never met, you need a reputation framework and a way for people to provide feedback to each other. This helps people make a fast decision about whether or not to interact with their temporary tie.

Also check out Paul’s IASummit talk: Bridging the Gap between our online and offline lives

Developers will be pleased to learn that Apple has removed a controversial "Rate on Delete" feature from iPhone 4. Starting in iPhone 2.2, when a user deleted an App from their iPhone, the operating system would ask the user to rate a App using the 1-5 star rating system in the App Store. The move was presumably meant to increase rating participation in the App Store.

What’s curious is that this feature lasted so long. I had heard from developers over a year ago how upset they were with this…the timing of the rating was obviously biased because the only people who would see it were those uninstalling an application. If that’s not a recipe for a negative rating, I don’t know what is.

via Apple Removes Rate on Delete for Apps in iPhone 4 – Mac Rumors.

Curiosity is one of the most underrated phenomena in the world. It’s ironic that people aren’t more curious about curiosity. It’s a powerful thing.

For example, if you ever wondered if someone is attracted to you, the answer lies in curiosity. If someone asks personal questions about your past, your plans, your likes and dislikes, that is an unambiguous sign of attraction. If someone tries to steer you into the bedroom without some conspicuous data gathering, that is a sign of simple horniness.

The friend variety of attraction is milder than the lover type. You can be friends with someone for years without remembering the names of his or her siblings. But if you love someone, you automatically develop a voracious appetite for information about that person.

When someone you are not attracted to talks a lot about his or her own life, you get bored to death. When someone you are attracted to talks a lot, you might find that person to be full of life, and fascinating. Attraction and curiosity are inseparable.

via Scott Adams Blog: Curiosity.

For Apple, which has enjoyed enormous success in recent years, “build it and they will pay” is business as usual. But it’s not a universal business truth. On the contrary, companies like Ikea, H. & M., and the makers of the Flip video camera are flourishing not by selling products or services that are “far better” than anyone else’s but by selling things that aren’t bad and cost a lot less. These products are much better than the cheap stuff you used to buy at Woolworth, and they tend to be appealingly styled, but, unlike Apple, the companies aren’t trying to build the best mousetrap out there. Instead, they’re engaged in what Wired recently christened the “good-enough revolution.” For them, the key to success isn’t excellence. It’s well-priced adequacy.

And then this stunning statement:

“The boom in information for consumers has also severely weakened middle-market firms. In the past, these companies were able to charge a premium price because their brands were taken as signals of reasonable quality and reliability. Today, consumers don’t need to rely on shorthand: they have Consumer Reports and J. D. Power, CNET and Amazon’s user ratings, and so on, which have made it easier to gauge differences in quality accurately. The result is that brands matter less…”

(my emphasis added)

via Apple : The New Yorker.

Frankly, most people’s tweets are neither interesting nor fun to read — certainly not on a daily or hourly basis. Many, not at all. I say this with no condemnation, since I admit mine are pretty lousy, too. And I have a theory about why.

Recently I received one of those random chain emails; it’s probably circulated through your in-box, as well. This one described an experiment organized by the Washington Post in 2007. A man played six Bach pieces on a violin for 45 minutes in the Washington DC Metro Station on a cold January morning. During the time he played, approximately two thousand people passed through the station. Of those, only six people stopped and listened, and then only for a very short while. The greatest levels of enthusiasm were displayed by young children, several of whom tugged on their parents, asking to stop and listen, but without success.

This concert, enjoyed by virtually none of the two thousand in the station that day, was given by the renowned violinist Joshua Bell, playing some of the most intricate pieces ever written. Two days before his concert in a theater in Boston had sold out with ticket prices averaging $100.

The circulating email challenges us to ponder what we each are missing. In a common place environment, at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

This leads to her theory about what makes someone good at Twittering:

These questions, I believe, are at the heart of the successful use of Twitter. Individuals who are most skilled at using this peculiar 140-character medium are those who do notice the small details of life, who capture the moments that others of us miss, who slow down to watch and listen while most race on, and who personalize the events they see.

Observing the beautiful in the mundane. Surely it’s one way to be happy.

via Are You Fun to Follow on Twitter? – Tammy Erickson – Harvard Business Review.

I can’t help but agree with all of them:

1. Services as Software – Gene is one of the first people in the UX industry to admit that good enough, fast and cheap tools like usertesting.com will have a real impact. While most people still feel the need to argue “User testing is important”…the market is moving past that. “How fast can you measure?” is as important as “Did we find everything?”
2. User Experience Analytics – Gene references a post I wrote called What Metric are you designing to improve today? and I think he’s absolutely right (obviously). This is where I’m focusing for the next year or more as I believe metrics-driven design is the future. I’ll be talking about this at UXLondon and am working hard on this at Performable.
3. Content Strategy – My friend Kristina Halvorson saw this coming…here is an excellent post in which she explains how content strategy is more than a bunch of tactics.
4. Return of the Mobile Web – Gene suggests that building apps using web standards is the eventual future of the mobile web, not getting locked into platforms like iPhone and Android. I would add to this by saying I actually think Apple would partially agree here…they are pushing HTML5 like gangbusters so that this can be a reality.
5. A Real Experience Economy – Are people moving away from a world of things to one that values experience more? I think Gene’s right on with this one.

Read the rest here: Five User Experience Trends I’ll be Watching in 2010.

If you are considering making changes to your website design, take a moment to consider the potential revenue impact of your redesign. (This graph) shows a theoretical overview of the ROI impact of various parts of your website.

I love that: “theoretical overview”. In other words, they really have no idea. But, if this is true, think about how it would rewire the way the design world works. Almost all money is pushed into technology and branding. Homepage, site redesigns, and custom CMSes are the cash cows of the design industry…imagine if most projects were not about those things but about simply improving these decision-oriented pages. Probably won’t happen, but fun to think about.

via Conversion Room: Improve your web-forms and increase conversions.

“All men dream; but not equally.
Those who dream by night in the dusty
recesses of their minds
Awake to find that it was vanity;

But the dreamers of day are dangerous men.
That they may act their dreams with open
eyes to make it possible.”

T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia)

As I sit looking at Tweetdeck this morning, looking over 40 avatars of people I know and don’t know, I wonder how much of my interaction is influenced by what a particular avatar looks like. Am I more willing to converse with someone who has a realistic avatar? A smiling avatar? Does the offbeat, non-human, text-based avatar inspire better communication or worse?

I have my hunches, and will write them up after I have done more research on the subject. In the meantime, here is some info on the origins of avatar.

From the Wikipedia entry for Avatar:

“An avatar (from the Sanskrit word for “a form of self”) is a computer user’s representation of himself/herself or alter ego, whether in the form of a three-dimensional model used in computer games, a two-dimensional icon (picture) used on Internet forums and other communities, or a text construct found on early systems such as MUDs. It is an object representing the embodiment of the user. The term “avatar” can also refer to the personality connected with the screen name, or handle, of an Internet user.”

One of the first references of avatars as digital representations was in the 1985 game Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. In this game the users goal was to become an avatar…it wasn’t until later versions that the user’s representation was called an avatar.

The first use of the term avatar in its current incarnation is possibly the work done at Lucasfilm Habitat Chronicles, created in 1986. Here is a nice piece in New York Times Magazine which digs into this a bit: On Language: Avatar. In this piece Aaron Britt interviews Randy Farmer, one of the creators of Habitat Chronicles, where the term was used to describe the online form of users. Says Randy:

“Chip (Morningstar) came up with the word avatar because back then, pre-Internet, you had to call a number with your telephone and then set it back into the cradle. You were reaching out into this game quite literally through a silver strand. The avatar was the incarnation of a deity, the player, in the online world. We liked the idea of the puppet master controlling his puppet, but instead of using strings, he was using a telephone line.

Here is a promotional video of Habitat which shows the avatars in action: Lucasfilm’s Habitat Promotional Video. Also check out The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat.

Another early exploration of avatars was in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 book Snow Crash. Here is a fascinating excerpt, in which Stephenson foresees a time when social norms build up around the fidelity of avatars, with sophistication being communicated in the rendering of realism:

“As Hiro approaches the Street, he sees two young couples, probably using their parents’ computers for a double date in the in the Metaverse, climbing down out of Port Zero, which is the local port of entry and monorail stop.

He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all a part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro’s avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he’s seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago, each with their own laptop. But they probably won’t talk to each other, any more than they would in Reality. These are nice kids, and they don’t want to talk to a solitary crossbreed with a slick custom avatar who’s packing a couple of swords.

You can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.

Hiro’s avatar just looks like Hiro, with the difference that no matter what Hiro is wearing in Reality, his avatar always wears a black leather kimono. Most hacker types don’t go in for garish avatars, because they know that it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis. Kind of the way people who really know clothing can appreciate the fine details that separate a cheap gray wool suit from an expensive hand-tailored gray wool suit.”

And, of course, the upcoming movie Avatar.

More on avatars:

How Important are Avatars?

If you sync seamlessly across devices, people will love you for it. It’s why I love the Apple ecosystem. I add a calendar event to my desktop, iPhone, or web app, and it automagically appears on the others. All of my mail is synced in all of these places so I never have to worry about missing email or knowing whether I replied or having to delete the same messages over again. The amount of time that this saves is invisible, yet invaluable.

Thanks to Flickr for hosting this pic

Yesterday during dinner with a few tech folks we hit on the topic of Dropbox, a file-syncing application that teams can use to collaborate. Dropbox is as simple as an app gets…simply install it, throw some files into your Dropbox folder, and it syncs to other computers or other people you want to share with. The reason people love it is that it just works, automagically. It simply syncs your files…that’s all it does. But it does it so well that people use the language of love to describe it.

Isn’t that a bit odd? Saying things like “I LOVE Dropbox!”? Well, in a world where we value any time savings like it were gold, seamless syncing becomes the gold standard. There is nothing worse than trying to figure out which copy of data is the latest, best, or primary copy. We know what we did last…if all of our devices knew then software would seem truly smart.

Today Robert Scoble tweeted about his love for the Kindle:

This is not ridiculously sophisticated functionality. It’s straight-forward…when Scoble reads something on his Kindle and then views the same thing on his laptop the software remembers where he was. It’s a bookmark, that’s it. And because it’s such a simple feature it might get overlooked…

So if you’re building an app used across devices consider focusing like gangbusters on the simple ability to seamlessly sync everything, so that people can immediately start in using one device where they left off using another. After seeing the rapturous language people use around this simple feature, I’m convinced it might be THE feature of a multi-device web.

Flickr: Microcopy

Creating the group was prompted by Relly Annett-Baker, a web copy-writer from England who is putting together some materials on the subject and asked if I had some good examples. I had a few, but most of the good ones have come from other folks who are working on cool things. It occurred to me that a Flickr group might be a good way to garner more interesting, curious and far-flung examples.

So feel free to add your examples directly to the group…it is open to the public.

And, if you’ve never heard this term before, read Writing Microcopy.