Q: What makes design different at Apple?
A: We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple  but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

[...] When you make a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea and everything changes — the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.
— Ive J. (2012) Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh by Marc Prigg

Design is inherently connected with prototype and make.

There isn’t much to add.

Apparel design is too utilitarian to qualify to copyright protection.
[...]
Because there’s no copyright protection in the fashion industry there’s a very open and creative ecology of creativity.

— Johanna Blakley (2010) “Lessons from fashion’s free culture” at TED

Fashion world don’t have any copyright protection, because “apparel is an utility”. There’s just trademark protection.

I didn’t know this, but to me this is really interesting and impressive by itself because it means that while some industries are trying to enforce strict laws… others are thriving exactly thanks to the same things the other industry wants to deny!

Tom Ford: And we found after much research that, actually not much research, quite simple research, that the counterfeit customer was not our customer.

Johanna Blakley: Imagine that. The people on Santee Alley are not the ones who shop at Gucci. (laughter)

Also, very interesting thing about jazz:

And that actually reminded me of jazz great, Charlie Parker. I don’t know if you’ve heard this anecdote, but I have. He said that one of the reasons he invented bebop was that he was pretty sure that white musicians wouldn’t be able to replicate the sound. He wanted to make it too difficult to copy.

But that would be just a few nice words… where’s the money? Well. First of all, here a few industries without copyright protection:

1. Recipes
2. Automobiles
3. Furniture
4. Magic tricks (no wonder they’re so secretive!)
5. Hairdos
6. Tattoos (“It’s not cool”)
7. Jokes
8. Fireworks
9. Rules of games
10. Smell of perfumes

And then the money: this is a screenshot from that video.

The text is small, but it just says that le left bars have low IP (intellectual property) protection, while the right ones (music, books, films, etc) have hight IP protection.

Oops!

Even if maybe that isn’t the only factor playing in those sales, the whole Johanna Blakley video is still making a few strong points. Watch it.

Thanks to Lawrence Oluyede and Sara Lando (in italian).

This kind of solution was great in a less wired world, and is still great for a lot of people. But what if we were able to find a design that could leverage different emotional responses such as satisfaction, instead of anxiety?

For example, I might borrow some design ideas from my friend Federico and think a bit about game design. In detail, what if we will use the basic logic of prizes instead of warnings? Think about powerups, levels and badges – Foursquare or Gowalla badges.

What if Mail could be able to award me a trophy for each Inbox Zero?
Or another one if I’m able to avoid checking the email for around 30 minutes – the time of a Pomodoro?
Or another one if I’m able to check the email just once a day for 5 days?
Or again the shamed email bankruptcy badge!

With this simple design solution, wouldn’t we have a good motivation to pursue a better way to manage our time, without any alarmism, without anxiety? Maybe, it could help to live a bit better just by changing the way we are motivated to check our mails.

The workshop on Social Usability is designed for an audience ranging from 10 to 30 people and it lasts for about two hours, while the discussion part usually goes on a little more, informally, so probably the best timeframe is 3 hours, as it is now.

The workshop is splitted in 4 different parts:

1. Social Usability (20′): theory, checklist and method
2. Analysis (45′): group work and discussion
3. Design (50′): individual work, pair testing and discussion
4. Wrap up (5′): closing remarks

I’m usually stunned by the results of this workshop, because interesting ideas, solutions appear so often and also interesting discussions will arise. During Frontiers of Interaction I’ve seen at least two great ideas that alone could make an interesting service (if not business!) and a few other that merged together could make some interesting tool. Sorry, but I can’t say which ideas they are. ;)

As a sidenote on the workshop: I find interesting when imprecisions in my slides or in my speech are able to trigger interesting questions and debates. I wonder if I should build workshops deliberately missing a few pieces of the puzzle. :)

Social Usability, like usability, is a quality attribute that assesses how easy social interactions are to make. The term “social usability” also refers to the methods for improving the ease of human-computer-human interactions during the design process.

Social Usability is defined by four properties (RICE):

1. Relations: How easy is it to find other people and connect to them? How easy is it to keep those connections active? How relevant are those connections?
2. Identity: How rich is one’s personal identity expression? How much are interests and passions expressed? How much are personal distinctive traits show? How much is privacy management detailed?
3. Communication: How fast can a message reach the other person? How many messages can one handle efficiently? How easy is it to handle conversations (1-to-1, 1-to-some, 1-to-many)?
4. Emergence of Groups: How easy is it to create groups, aggregate and talk around a common interest? How active are groups once established? How long do they last? How much is important to be part of a group?

The Social Usability Checklist

Social Usability is part of a methodology that I’ve co-developed with the psychologist and researcher Gianandrea Giacoma during our wider work on social networks. To make this theory usable in our everyday work we developed a simple Social Usability Checklist, a simple instrument able to drive the analysis and the critical thought behind any good social network design process.

The checklist is based on the four RICE properties, each of them exploded in a few key terms with an associated question. All of them start with “Is there a way to…?”.

Relations:

• findability, inside: …find other people inside the network?
• findability, outside: …find other people outside the network?
• separation: …see friend-of-friend’s profiles?
• privacy: …allow or deny other’s contact?
• keep : …keep in touch with friends?
  • proximity: …see who is closer to myself?
  • time: …see who I’ve lost contact with?
  • themes: …involve your friends in common activities?
• public relation: …broadcast yourself?
• excellence: …give credit to relevant people you know?
• curiosity: …receive suggestions about interesting contacts?
• management: …categorize or group contacts?

Identity:

• amplitude: …express yourself?
  • mood: …express your mood?
  • appearance: …customize your profile?
  • person: …represent your life?
  • avatar: …create an online identity?
• interests: …show your interests?
  • offline: …show your offline interests?
  • do: …show your online activities?
• uniqueness: …distinguish yourself from others?
• privacy: …show who you are to who you want?
• group: …show your groups membership?

Communication:

• speed: …communicate quickly with your contacts?
  • sync: …meet together to talk?
  • async: …leave a message to someone?
• quantity: …handle a high amount of messages?
  • complexity: …have complex conversations?
  • parallelism: …manage muyltiple conversation channels with different users?
  • aggregability: …be supported by the system to handle many messages?
• richness: …send and receive rich multimedia messages?
• private conversations: …have a conversation with one person?
• public conversations: …have a public conversation?
• plural conversations: …have a conversation with a specific group?

Emergence of Groups:

• findability: …find and join a group that shares an interest with you?
• easyness: …create a group of friends or around a theme?
• bottom-up type: …show up in a group thanks to the things you do?
• liveliness: …see how much the group is active?
  • presence: …see the online people in that group?
  • production: …see how many contents the group does produce?
  • subscribers: …see how many people are there in the group?
  • frequency : …see how often people interact in that group?
• longevity: …see how long that group does exist?
  • short: …create short-term groups?
  • long: …create long-term groups?

The Social Usability Checklist is very useful since it allows the designer to be asking the right questions in order to build a good social infrastructure and to include or exclude specific features that might or might not be required.

You can download it as a cheatsheet here (PDF, 360kb).

The Checklist Process

The checklist is useful also because it’s a simple tool but can be used by different people with different skills and can also be used as a simple outline or as a guideline for a deeper analysis.

In the most complete scenario we have four possible steps:

1. Outline, made by anyone: skimming through the list and answering those questions is simple and is often enough to have a global view of the system.
2. Analysis, made by an expert: each question can be then associated with one or more user paths, outlining the single steps you have to go through and maybe counting the number of interactions in an approach similar to KLM-GOMS.
3. User tests, made by an expert with 5-10 users: the very same questions of the checklist could then be given to an user during a test in order to show problems and to see if there are different ways to do the same things. For existing systems it could be interesting to check both a new user and an expert user. The results from phase 2 and 3 can then be compared to have a complete view of the social interactions enabled by the system.
4. Merge, made by an expert: is then a way to correlate the design objectives with the social features that exists on the system, in order to see if, how and where they could be improved – or dampened.

The most interesting feature of the checklist and the related process is that it’s very flexible and can be used either if you have 5 minutes, 1 hour or a few days of work.

I think it’s a very useful tool in the hand of a good designer, but of course it can be improved and refined. If you have something to say, I’d love to hear your feedback.

I think that the home folder is an interesting topic because it’s very narrow in its scope but it has a critical role in enhancing the user experience, both for first time users and power users. It’s one of those things that should be transparent: so easy and so fast that you don’t even notice it’s there.

In fact I’ve designed many times a local ‘start page’ for my own use, usually in HTML on my local server. I think that they were pretty good, but a few years ago I noticed that the real value could come from some form of integration with the browser, and that the bookmarks were the first element that required integration.

As you might guess, it was no surprise for me to see the start pages of Opera, Safari and Chrome, well designed in many ways, while at the same time I think they’re missing a real appeal for power users.

Things I don’t want in my home

There are a few things that I think should be avoided in the home tab:

1. Any search tool: the location bar – or awesome bar in Firefox – exists for a reason. One of its core roles is allowing search (and I think that the double location + search boxes should be unified). So, my home tab shouldn’t include any search field.
2. Any complex interaction: the home tab must be fast to load, fast to use. It isn’t a dashboard: if I wanted a dashboard I’ll make iGoogle or Netvibes my home page.
3. Any unrequested automation: what if you visit a website that you don’t want others to see? And what if automatically it appears on your home tab, because it’s one of the most used websites? Argh, it could be a real problem for many (think about porn…).
4. Any new tool to handle: I already have bookmarks, search and external services. I don’t want to manage another tool. It should be something automatic or a view on something I’m already using.
5. Anything with a mood: I think that tools must be neutral at the beginning, and I could customize them afterwards.

Things I do want in my home

I don’t have great visions about a browser home page, but a few ideas are:

1. I want my bookmarks: the interface should be a specific view on my existing bookmarks. More integration the better.
2. I want a visuospatial reference: I’d love to have items placed on a 2D space instead of inside a list, so I could train my memory to locate them faster.

The Foldable Home Tab Concept

I did some research looking at how people around me used the bookmarks and the home tab but of course a proper user test should be done in order to see real usage patterns.

To find an idea I started from my personal way of using bookmarks: I’m currently using just the bookmark bar or the location bar, while I don’t use the bookmarks manager almost at all.

My design have a home tab with visuospatial bookmarks that folds into the normal bookmarks bar. Probably a refined version of this idea could avoid a bookmarks manager.

The Mozilla Labs Design Challenge required a video, so here’s my explanation of the concept:

Mozilla Design Challenge Winter’09 – Foldable Home Tab on Vimeo.

What do you think? Would you have done any change or improvement?