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The best part? Interviewing someone like Bill Scott about his company, Netflix, and then finding out three weeks before press time that he doesn’t work for Netflix anymore. Bill Scott. Yep. Fortunately, Scott’s career and influence doesn’t start and stop with Netflix, nor even with his current position at Meebo. He’s a published author, an in-demand UX lecturer, and a heck of a nice guy. He sat down with us at the end of a busy day to talk about the evolution of UX, bidding adieu to the scroll bar, and why happy employees make better products. And yes, he did give us a look under Netflix’s big red hood. Want Magazine: So, Bill. What’s your definition of User Experience? Bill Scott: I’ll cop out and give a couple. Because if you’re doing something that’s much more entertainment--an engaging game--then it’s much more about fun, defined in a sense of thrill and fear, and all those emotions, and you’re always climbing that ladder of challenge and success and challenge and success. "But there’s another kind of fun—[as applied to] productivity apps…if you can get the flow, and the tool becomes transparent and visible to you and there’s a transparency to it and you get your stuff done and you feel smarter, then that’s a good user experience. And then, in [Netflix’s] situation a good user experience is, you found a movie that you enjoyed that you didn’t know that you were going to enjoy. So…games: more directly fun. And then productivity apps are all the way out here, where it’s more like “I’m very invisible.” And [the Netflix UX] is a little bit more in-between. Let’s talk a bit about your job at Netflix. I was surprised to hear that there are in fact two UX departments in Netflix. One is User Interface Engineering (of which you’re the director), but there’s also a UX department, where you have a director of User Experience. Yes. Rochelle King is my counterpart. Wonderful person to work with. And [her] team is the actual UX design team. And my team is what a lot of people call the front-end engineers, the engineers that are actually putting the website together. So their skills range from, usually HTML, XML, CSS and Java script. Although I like to have people in the team that also have design sensibilities. So why is the author of Designing Web Interfaces heading up an Engineering department? It’s actually an interesting role, because User Experience is valued here highly at Netflix, and they like to hire people who bring a hybrid of skills. So while someone like myself could do the User Experience side, I do the User Engineering, that’s where I put my focus, but I can easily brainstorm with Rochelle. I don’t try to run the design team. She does a great job of that. When I was at Yahoo!, I was [the Ajax Evangelist], and so it involved both the design side and the engineering side. At first I was in the core design team, and then when I launched the Yahoo! pattern library, that was design assets. But then I went over and became engineering manager for a while for a product called Yahoo! for Teachers. So I’m kind of one of those odd birds that jump back and forth between engineering and design. And I like that. I enjoy the back and forth. Can one manufacture “want” into a product or service? I think you can…One can have the right motive in doing that…persuasive experience is what we would call it. If you understand human psychology…you can persuade a little bit better. For example, people want a big set of choices, [but] if the Paradox of Choice theory is correct, people are actually happier with fewer choices. If you know that generally things you put up first, people are going to have a higher take on, you can manufacture a little bit of want and desire there. You can say that something’s free—and that creates this good feeling. People are drawn to that. So there are certainly things you can do. A good book I would recommend to people is Susan Weinschenk’s book, Neuro Web Design, a very good book. She’s got some YouTube web videos also. And she talks about these things like fear of loss and other things like the paradox of choice and some experiments with that. I think it’s like most things in life, though. If you try too hard to do something, say, superficial like that, then it becomes too apparent and it falls apart…You could really try to manipulate people with the fear and scarcity and the last minute deal, [but] it goes overboard. Because you’re just focused on that. You’re a one-trick pony. How much importance do you think marketing and advertising have towards creating this kind of want and desire for a product? I think a lot. A lot of the success we have had [at Netflix] is because we have a great marketing group that’s got the Netflix brand out. The red envelope has been huge. It’s like this symbol of happiness people have when they get it. It’s huge for us now. Of course, you have to envision some day in the future, [Netflix will focus more on] streaming. And…we won’t have red envelopes, which will be a sad day. But yeah, it creates a tone. Our brand team, we don’t own red. Obviously. Nobody owns red. But we do have a red color that people do recognize as us, and we try to bring that forward. What is the Interaction Designer’s job: to influence conversion or extended use? What is the interaction designer’s job, whether it’s an engineer, whether it’s a designer? Is it to make a product desirable for adoption--to influence purchaser adoption? Or is it to make it consistently enjoyable over use? There’s kind of a tension between pure design, aesthetics, and business concerns it seems like you’re kind of getting at there. Really, at the end of the day, you can blend the two together. What we try to find is the intersection point between what’s a good user experience and also what helps the business. Between conversions and reuse. There’s some things you can [do], surface certain things in the site…People tend to enjoy it more if you can find hidden gems and things that are more of a treasure. We don’t have hard data on that, but we have a pretty good hunch based on some data. Then it’s a good experience--and it’s not bad for business either. BS: From a designer, the challenge you know in hiring a design team at pretty much any web company that’s going to be successful, they can’t just be about design. The team as a whole has to be thinking about the business. But I think [this is] one of the challenges in the design team, and I work with Rochelle on this. When she hires, I interview the designers too and I’m part of her process. You have to find designers and engineers who enjoy living in constraints. Some designers want all the freedom, and they want to be artists really and not designers. Designers have to design for solutions. And so you have to mentally prepare people in a team to say, this is actually fun. This is a challenge. Here are the constraints that you have. Yeah, you want to fill this experience, but to win at this game, these business metrics need to move. And it’s an objective. It can be read wrong. It can be misused. But it’s an objective measure, and you can go against that. But how does that affect the quality of the product and/or service that we’re talking about here? It affects it because happy people design happy products. I heard this one company recently where they were telling me the product managers were cussing out the designers and just lambasting the engineers. This is in the valley here. What a bunch of nonsense. We all have to go home, and we have families, and live civilly. It affects our work. But if you have teams that, if the reward structure of the whole organization is around moving the business forward, everybody gets the value of that. People that enjoy their work are going to be more creative. I just believe that. That book Driven that just came out recently talks about motivation of creatives. It’s not about the stick-and-carrot approach. It’s really about being driven by the desire to create. Now, we temper that because we have the numbers that drive the business. It sounds like what you’re saying is that having a cohesive team or teams is the best way to create a product that people want. I think it’s a strong ingredient. I think without that ingredient, you can fall apart pretty quickly. It certainly wouldn’t stand on its own if we didn’t have the [shared] passion towards simplicity, to not just add a bunch of features. No feature is actually sacred. It can be taken away if it’s not something that’s valuable. A resource that’s not really helping our members. The objective is of the measures, business measures…web analytics is a really important part of it. Well, it’s only one piece of the puzzle, I should say, but very important. Do you see the field of UX evolving past the point we’re at now? Yeah. I really do. We’re definitely at a change point. For the last 26 years, we’ve had the mouse, we’ve had a lot of things that go with that. It’s interesting. I was thinking about this the other day. My first introduction to the mouse and the scroll bar was a Mac in 1984…and I was ecstatic that I could actually scroll back and forth and see my Mac Basic program and not just roll off the window. I could actually scroll back and forth. And I thought it was quite appropriate that if anybody took the scroll bar away from me, it would be Apple because they gave it to me to begin with. I guess 26 years seemed kind of poetic. They giveth, and finally they taketh away. [Now], you just flick with your finger. We’re at kind of one of those watershed moments. Just like the iPhone ushered in a lot of stuff, I think the iPad will too. If it’s not the iPad itself that just takes off and sells zillions of units, it will definitely be devices like that. And I think because it changes the game around the input device. I’m not saying touch takes over everything. But certainly as we move that way, it begins to change a lot of the way we think about things. And if you design an interface, you would never design an interface with a lot of scrolled areas, because the scrollbar can get to be really ugly. Visually dense. But you can actually have lots of sliding panels in a touch space. And, so, it just changes a bunch of things around. The physicality. The iPad’s going to [change things] a lot. Whenever you change the assumptions like that, it’s great for all of us, because we rethink things. And even if we don’t end up where we thought we would end up by doing that, even if it’s not the iPad, the thing that changes the world, it certainly starts changing the direction. So these are really interesting times. Because we’re getting interfaces into lots of places they haven’t been. Mobile space, even phones. Are you talking strictly about gestural interfaces? I’m talking about gestural, the natural user interfaces, but I’m also talking about even on the TV--it’s left-right-up-down, so that’s not a great interface yet. BS: It’s interesting. The secret sauce to the user experience here is two things that people don’t think of. Well, one of them they probably do. One of them that most people don’t think of [is that] the goodness of the user experience has more to do with the service than the site. Because if you become a member of Netflix, and you get a movie that you enjoy, you have love in your heart for Netflix. And it’s true! When I first came to Netflix…and I started going out and speaking, I got a lot more love. I got love [when I would speak] for Yahoo!…but I got a lot more gushing [with Netflix]. And it was like, okay, wait a minute. I know the warts of our site, so I’m like, “It’s not perfect or anything. There’s things that can be better.” But because the service is good, the whole experience is good, then it transfers some goodness to the site, even if it may not be there. So that’s one. The other is, the devotion to the analytical side of usability. I come from the Alan Cooper kind of world, not quite as extreme as Alan. I don’t believe that. “Good design is self-evident,” he would say. One of the things that drew me to Netflix was because I was always a design-by-hunch kind of guy, I had a knack for design. I wanted to bring [numbers] into it. Around here, our metrics' are simply around acquisition—membership. getting people in. But, thinking of the member side, how do you measure retention? You can’t, until it’s too late. So you measure it by leading indicators. Those leading indicators can be things like consumption. You can know if somebody added something. And now you can [measure] plays [of streaming media]. And so we’ve got metrics around that. And then there’s also “taste input”—star rating. If you rate something, that’s an important metric. And those things all tie together. Because when you get into the consumer world, most people out there are not like us. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Google video, “What is a browser?” If you haven’t, check it out. The Google Chrome team goes out and surveys people in Times Square, and I think it’s 8% of the people surveyed that day could articulate what a browser is. “Oh, it’s Google, it’s search, it’s whatever.” And that’s who we’re building websites for. [amazonshowcase_15315b42fd4325e6dbaa128e6e1bf020]" ["post_title"]=> string(30) "Bill Scott: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(329) "We talk with the former Director of User Experience Engineering at Netflix about the nuts and bolts of Netflix’s UX department(s!) and reveal their “secret sauce.” Bill also explains to us why “Happy people design happy products,” and shows us how favorite online app lets him stay close to his granddaughter in Alaska." 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The best part? Interviewing someone like Bill Scott about his company, Netflix, and then finding out three weeks before press time that he doesn’t work for Netflix anymore. Bill Scott. Yep. Fortunately, Scott’s career and influence doesn’t start and stop with Netflix, nor even with his current position at Meebo. He’s a published author, an in-demand UX lecturer, and a heck of a nice guy. He sat down with us at the end of a busy day to talk about the evolution of UX, bidding adieu to the scroll bar, and why happy employees make better products. And yes, he did give us a look under Netflix’s big red hood. Want Magazine: So, Bill. What’s your definition of User Experience? Bill Scott: I’ll cop out and give a couple. Because if you’re doing something that’s much more entertainment--an engaging game--then it’s much more about fun, defined in a sense of thrill and fear, and all those emotions, and you’re always climbing that ladder of challenge and success and challenge and success. "But there’s another kind of fun—[as applied to] productivity apps…if you can get the flow, and the tool becomes transparent and visible to you and there’s a transparency to it and you get your stuff done and you feel smarter, then that’s a good user experience. And then, in [Netflix’s] situation a good user experience is, you found a movie that you enjoyed that you didn’t know that you were going to enjoy. So…games: more directly fun. And then productivity apps are all the way out here, where it’s more like “I’m very invisible.” And [the Netflix UX] is a little bit more in-between. Let’s talk a bit about your job at Netflix. I was surprised to hear that there are in fact two UX departments in Netflix. One is User Interface Engineering (of which you’re the director), but there’s also a UX department, where you have a director of User Experience. Yes. Rochelle King is my counterpart. Wonderful person to work with. And [her] team is the actual UX design team. And my team is what a lot of people call the front-end engineers, the engineers that are actually putting the website together. So their skills range from, usually HTML, XML, CSS and Java script. Although I like to have people in the team that also have design sensibilities. So why is the author of Designing Web Interfaces heading up an Engineering department? It’s actually an interesting role, because User Experience is valued here highly at Netflix, and they like to hire people who bring a hybrid of skills. So while someone like myself could do the User Experience side, I do the User Engineering, that’s where I put my focus, but I can easily brainstorm with Rochelle. I don’t try to run the design team. She does a great job of that. When I was at Yahoo!, I was [the Ajax Evangelist], and so it involved both the design side and the engineering side. At first I was in the core design team, and then when I launched the Yahoo! pattern library, that was design assets. But then I went over and became engineering manager for a while for a product called Yahoo! for Teachers. So I’m kind of one of those odd birds that jump back and forth between engineering and design. And I like that. I enjoy the back and forth. Can one manufacture “want” into a product or service? I think you can…One can have the right motive in doing that…persuasive experience is what we would call it. If you understand human psychology…you can persuade a little bit better. For example, people want a big set of choices, [but] if the Paradox of Choice theory is correct, people are actually happier with fewer choices. If you know that generally things you put up first, people are going to have a higher take on, you can manufacture a little bit of want and desire there. You can say that something’s free—and that creates this good feeling. People are drawn to that. So there are certainly things you can do. A good book I would recommend to people is Susan Weinschenk’s book, Neuro Web Design, a very good book. She’s got some YouTube web videos also. And she talks about these things like fear of loss and other things like the paradox of choice and some experiments with that. I think it’s like most things in life, though. If you try too hard to do something, say, superficial like that, then it becomes too apparent and it falls apart…You could really try to manipulate people with the fear and scarcity and the last minute deal, [but] it goes overboard. Because you’re just focused on that. You’re a one-trick pony. How much importance do you think marketing and advertising have towards creating this kind of want and desire for a product? I think a lot. A lot of the success we have had [at Netflix] is because we have a great marketing group that’s got the Netflix brand out. The red envelope has been huge. It’s like this symbol of happiness people have when they get it. It’s huge for us now. Of course, you have to envision some day in the future, [Netflix will focus more on] streaming. And…we won’t have red envelopes, which will be a sad day. But yeah, it creates a tone. Our brand team, we don’t own red. Obviously. Nobody owns red. But we do have a red color that people do recognize as us, and we try to bring that forward. What is the Interaction Designer’s job: to influence conversion or extended use? What is the interaction designer’s job, whether it’s an engineer, whether it’s a designer? Is it to make a product desirable for adoption--to influence purchaser adoption? Or is it to make it consistently enjoyable over use? There’s kind of a tension between pure design, aesthetics, and business concerns it seems like you’re kind of getting at there. Really, at the end of the day, you can blend the two together. What we try to find is the intersection point between what’s a good user experience and also what helps the business. Between conversions and reuse. There’s some things you can [do], surface certain things in the site…People tend to enjoy it more if you can find hidden gems and things that are more of a treasure. We don’t have hard data on that, but we have a pretty good hunch based on some data. Then it’s a good experience--and it’s not bad for business either. BS: From a designer, the challenge you know in hiring a design team at pretty much any web company that’s going to be successful, they can’t just be about design. The team as a whole has to be thinking about the business. But I think [this is] one of the challenges in the design team, and I work with Rochelle on this. When she hires, I interview the designers too and I’m part of her process. You have to find designers and engineers who enjoy living in constraints. Some designers want all the freedom, and they want to be artists really and not designers. Designers have to design for solutions. And so you have to mentally prepare people in a team to say, this is actually fun. This is a challenge. Here are the constraints that you have. Yeah, you want to fill this experience, but to win at this game, these business metrics need to move. And it’s an objective. It can be read wrong. It can be misused. But it’s an objective measure, and you can go against that. But how does that affect the quality of the product and/or service that we’re talking about here? It affects it because happy people design happy products. I heard this one company recently where they were telling me the product managers were cussing out the designers and just lambasting the engineers. This is in the valley here. What a bunch of nonsense. We all have to go home, and we have families, and live civilly. It affects our work. But if you have teams that, if the reward structure of the whole organization is around moving the business forward, everybody gets the value of that. People that enjoy their work are going to be more creative. I just believe that. That book Driven that just came out recently talks about motivation of creatives. It’s not about the stick-and-carrot approach. It’s really about being driven by the desire to create. Now, we temper that because we have the numbers that drive the business. It sounds like what you’re saying is that having a cohesive team or teams is the best way to create a product that people want. I think it’s a strong ingredient. I think without that ingredient, you can fall apart pretty quickly. It certainly wouldn’t stand on its own if we didn’t have the [shared] passion towards simplicity, to not just add a bunch of features. No feature is actually sacred. It can be taken away if it’s not something that’s valuable. A resource that’s not really helping our members. The objective is of the measures, business measures…web analytics is a really important part of it. Well, it’s only one piece of the puzzle, I should say, but very important. Do you see the field of UX evolving past the point we’re at now? Yeah. I really do. We’re definitely at a change point. For the last 26 years, we’ve had the mouse, we’ve had a lot of things that go with that. It’s interesting. I was thinking about this the other day. My first introduction to the mouse and the scroll bar was a Mac in 1984…and I was ecstatic that I could actually scroll back and forth and see my Mac Basic program and not just roll off the window. I could actually scroll back and forth. And I thought it was quite appropriate that if anybody took the scroll bar away from me, it would be Apple because they gave it to me to begin with. I guess 26 years seemed kind of poetic. They giveth, and finally they taketh away. [Now], you just flick with your finger. We’re at kind of one of those watershed moments. Just like the iPhone ushered in a lot of stuff, I think the iPad will too. If it’s not the iPad itself that just takes off and sells zillions of units, it will definitely be devices like that. And I think because it changes the game around the input device. I’m not saying touch takes over everything. But certainly as we move that way, it begins to change a lot of the way we think about things. And if you design an interface, you would never design an interface with a lot of scrolled areas, because the scrollbar can get to be really ugly. Visually dense. But you can actually have lots of sliding panels in a touch space. And, so, it just changes a bunch of things around. The physicality. The iPad’s going to [change things] a lot. Whenever you change the assumptions like that, it’s great for all of us, because we rethink things. And even if we don’t end up where we thought we would end up by doing that, even if it’s not the iPad, the thing that changes the world, it certainly starts changing the direction. So these are really interesting times. Because we’re getting interfaces into lots of places they haven’t been. Mobile space, even phones. Are you talking strictly about gestural interfaces? I’m talking about gestural, the natural user interfaces, but I’m also talking about even on the TV--it’s left-right-up-down, so that’s not a great interface yet. BS: It’s interesting. The secret sauce to the user experience here is two things that people don’t think of. Well, one of them they probably do. One of them that most people don’t think of [is that] the goodness of the user experience has more to do with the service than the site. Because if you become a member of Netflix, and you get a movie that you enjoy, you have love in your heart for Netflix. And it’s true! When I first came to Netflix…and I started going out and speaking, I got a lot more love. I got love [when I would speak] for Yahoo!…but I got a lot more gushing [with Netflix]. And it was like, okay, wait a minute. I know the warts of our site, so I’m like, “It’s not perfect or anything. There’s things that can be better.” But because the service is good, the whole experience is good, then it transfers some goodness to the site, even if it may not be there. So that’s one. The other is, the devotion to the analytical side of usability. I come from the Alan Cooper kind of world, not quite as extreme as Alan. I don’t believe that. “Good design is self-evident,” he would say. One of the things that drew me to Netflix was because I was always a design-by-hunch kind of guy, I had a knack for design. I wanted to bring [numbers] into it. Around here, our metrics' are simply around acquisition—membership. getting people in. But, thinking of the member side, how do you measure retention? You can’t, until it’s too late. So you measure it by leading indicators. Those leading indicators can be things like consumption. You can know if somebody added something. And now you can [measure] plays [of streaming media]. And so we’ve got metrics around that. And then there’s also “taste input”—star rating. If you rate something, that’s an important metric. And those things all tie together. Because when you get into the consumer world, most people out there are not like us. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Google video, “What is a browser?” If you haven’t, check it out. The Google Chrome team goes out and surveys people in Times Square, and I think it’s 8% of the people surveyed that day could articulate what a browser is. “Oh, it’s Google, it’s search, it’s whatever.” And that’s who we’re building websites for. [amazonshowcase_15315b42fd4325e6dbaa128e6e1bf020]" ["post_title"]=> string(30) "Bill Scott: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(329) "We talk with the former Director of User Experience Engineering at Netflix about the nuts and bolts of Netflix’s UX department(s!) and reveal their “secret sauce.” Bill also explains to us why “Happy people design happy products,” and shows us how favorite online app lets him stay close to his granddaughter in Alaska." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(10) "bill-scott" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 07:54:33" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 14:54:33" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(25) "http://wantmagazine/?p=22" ["menu_order"]=> int(5) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(2) "32" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } [1]=> object(stdClass)#322 (24) { ["ID"]=> int(167) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "1" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2010-05-10 00:41:30" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-10 07:41:30" ["post_content"]=> string(22589) "Dan Saffer is a man with strong opinions, varied interests, and quite possibly, a distaste for the term “User Experience.” Mind you, Saffer is far from “anti-usability.” His track record as an Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path, a founder/principal of design consultancy Kicker Studio, and the writer of Designing Gestural Interfaces, should put paid to that. He merely feels the term, when applied to an industry, bites off more than it can chew. We traveled to SF’s South Park neighborhood to interview him in Kicker Studio’s echo-rich, dog-friendly loft offices. It was late on a Friday, he’d had a crazy week and casually nursed a glass of Bourbon as we talked about UX, robotics, magazines on tablets, and how good usability should help us forget that computers are everywhere. Want Magazine: Beyond the textbook definition, what is user experience to you? Dan Saffer: What is User Experience? Well, there’s a lot of different ways of thinking about it...User Experience for me is kind of the overall picture, what used to be called “creative direction” is now called User Experience, because it contains everything from architecture to industrial design to visual design to interactive design to sound design. A very kind of holistic umbrella term that encompasses all of those things under it. All those disciplines to me are in service to an overall experience. To me there aren’t very many actual user experience designers. There are people who are doing different disciplines sometimes at different times under this user experience banner. It sounds like what you’re talking about is it’s a much bigger tent than it used to be--so big that you don’t find people that have a skill set that encompasses it anymore. I think that’s definitely true. It’s very hard to be very good at disparate fields like architecture and content strategy. There’s a pretty broad range of skill sets in there depending on the kind of product that you’re building. If it’s an interactive product, for instance, you may have an industrial designer, you may have service designers, sound designers, all kinds of things, or if it’s a website, you may have visual designers, architects, content strategists, copy writers, all those people. So it can be very different people working at very different kinds of ways, all under User Experience. DS: The next big wave after touch and gesture is probably going to be robotics. That’s my guess, anyway. What are you seeing at the consumer level currently that is interesting? Currently the one that’s really out that people just adore is Roomba. That’s the one that everyone loves, everyone names them, puts stickers on them, talks to them. They really think of them as being family members. And it’s just a really kind of fascinating item. Certainly there are other cultures, Japan, Korea, that are far, far ahead of us. Korea has a whole department of robotics, like a Ministry of Robotics or something, where they want to put robots in everyone’s home by, I think it was like 2015…Because they are facing, as we are here, a glut of people who are becoming old, who are becoming elders. And in order to care for them, they see robotics as a real solution to that. An automated solution. Right—do small automated tasks that are difficult, or can help provide things like security and communication…and mobility tasks that become difficult for people as they get older. So I think there’s a real growth market there that’s untapped. We were just at CES last month, and there was a really amazing, this robot seal that they had there. It was mostly for autistic kids. And it was really beautiful. I thought it was going to be really creepy, but it was actually this really great seal that they could hold, and it purred and it felt warm. As you stroked its fur, it had touch sensors so that it really woke up and responded in a very kind of real way, and they say that it’s really great for kids with autism. That they really start to respond to it. And for elder care. People who just need comfort. DS: If something’s not usable, it’s eventually not going to be desirable, certainly not for the kinds of tools that I make. For jewelry or something, all that matters is that it’s desirable, but for interactive products, eventually if it’s not useful, you’re not going to want it, eventually. It’s going to go away. But how do you create that desire is a really tricky and hard question. And some of it is about creating products with personality. What is the personality of the product, and how does that personality manifest itself? And is that something I want, as a consumer, in my life? Does this somehow reflect me or who I want to be? Or is it simply appealing, something that I want to spend time with? That was what was so great about the site Mint, was that it had this really conversational tone. It had a kind of friendly, appealing, easy to understand, jargon-free persona about it that was just refreshing when it came time to think about financial service. So it was like, “Oh, this is something new, something that I would want to spend time doing…” Other banking sites may be more useful or usable, but they’re certainly not more desirable, because it feels like spending time with them is spending time doing work. It’s a chore. To slog through them and put in your data and all those kinds of things. It’s not a pleasurable experience. How much importance would you put on marketing and advertising towards achieving product infatuation? Marketing and advertising plays a huge part…And as much as we try to, as designers, there’s this reflexive, “Oh, God. Marketing and advertising.” A lot of times it is a core component of what we’re trying to do. I think one of Apple’s secret weapons over the years has been its marketing and advertising. There’s no way that Apple would have had the success that it had with the iPod and the iPhone and stuff like that without its advertising partners. It doesn’t matter really how usable or useful something is if no one’s using it! If no one can find it, or no one’s heard about it, you can have the greatest product in the world, and it may not matter. Sites like social media sites are a perfect example of this: Unless you have enough people to populate it, it just withers on the vine. You could create the next Facebook that is so much better (and some would argue that that wouldn’t be very hard to do). But if you don’t have that core group of people, then it just doesn’t matter. And I think that’s where marketing and advertising can play that key part. Now, certainly, designers can make it easier on them by creating products that are beautiful and display their functions in a beautiful way and are approachable and all those good things that we really strive to do. A lot of what we do here at Kicker are new technology [projects]. People come to us and say, “We’ve got this [brand new technology]. What can you do with this? What is the product here?” And so some of that is figuring out: what is going to make people want this thing? What’s going to drive it? And for us [our priority is], what’s the personality of it? How is that going to make people want to even think about adopting it? How am I going to try this for the first time? With new products, especially with things like touch screens and gestures, which we do a lot of, there’s this hesitation, like, “Am I going to break this thing? I’m afraid to try it because I’m going to look stupid doing it.” But [our job is] really to make [people think], “No, it’s really fine. Just try it. It’ll be okay.” That’s really important with new technologies in particular. Because people come to it with expectations that may or may not be met and how you’re able to meet those expectations and hopefully exceed them. Or, when the expectations aren’t met how, do you fail in a way that’s not off-putting? Failure is really a chance to product personality. Flickr does a great job of this. When something doesn’t work, it tells you why. It offers a suggestion, like, “Hey have you tried this?” There are ways that failure can be a place to show personality. Is the interaction designer’s job to influence initial adoption, and purchase, or is their job to make the user experience enjoyable for the long run? It’s definitely some of both. Alan Cooper has a great thing about this, where he says, we spend way too much time on those initial moments when people first start using it, and then we neglect all the people, once they get past that, when they’re intermediate or advanced. It’s like we’ve given them no tools, and then the product seems too simplistic for them. So it’s a hard balance to strike. How do you give enough meat for intermediate users, which is where most people end up being, while not being too intimidating for someone coming at the site for the first time? You have to build up a product knowledge that leads people as rapidly as you can into being intermediates. But you still have to design those [adoption] hooks into the service. I think one of the great things about Blogger back when it started 5 or 6 years ago;  it seemed just like this FTP service. “What is this thing?” And when Jeff Veen and some of the guys at Adaptive Path [took it on], they said, okay. It’s three things. And they really aligned it, you do one step, two step, three step. And they made it so very straightforward that all of a sudden adoption just took off. Because there was this three simple steps that led you into becoming a blogger. And I think that was brilliant. You can do those kinds of things that are basically little attractors…that really get people hooked in. And the history of that goes back ages and ages. Think about old video arcade [games]—they would tease you as you walked by the video game. It would be playing a little movie. And you’d be like, “Hey, that looks interesting. I can put a quarter in and start to shoot or move the joystick around.” That little attraction affordance to draw people in is an important piece to design. DS: Now certainly that’s not all you should design. Then you get into the meat of, “Okay, now you’re here, you’ve got all this. You have tasks that you need to do.”…No matter how entertaining it is, you still have to get stuff done. One of the things that interaction designers can do is what Brandon Schauer calls “The Long Wow,” where over time, you keep building in these things that you discover, not your first time using it, but your fiftieth time using it, your hundredth time using it. Those things that are really important over time, so you keep getting reinvested in the service, because they keep giving you something. They keep rewarding you for being a long time user. If you can think about them and really design them in from the beginning, It's a really great thing. I mean, obviously, some of that stuff comes after people have used the product for a long time…People start to suggest things: “Why don’t you have ‘x’?” Or, “This would be really helpful,”…which is of course it’s own danger. And then you start adding stuff, and the product can drift away from what it was originally done for. The “long wow” you just described is very similar to what makes a good multi-level game. Everything from the shelf appeal to the hooks that you’re talking about. I think there’s so much that interaction designers can learn from game designers. There’s always that idea of a reward. What am I leveling up to? Or, what am I resourcing here? In some cases it might be money. In some cases it’s time. In some cases it’s effort…It’s interesting. Because…the things game designers think about first are the emotion, and “What is the aesthetic appeal of this?” And then they say, “What are the game mechanics that can cause that?”…More thinking like a game designer, thinking, “What’s the aesthetic appeal? What’s the emotional appeal that we’re trying to do, and then how can we start to structure the product to achieve those goals?” Is an interesting way to start thinking about designing products. There’s a project that you guys have worked on recently, the Mag+ demo. That is something that we’re particularly interested in, especially because we’re a magazine entity, and we’re interested in moving to a format like that. Mag+ is a really interesting project. It’s with the magazine publisher Bonnier, who are Swedish and they do every kind of magazine you can think of, from cooking magazines to Field and Stream, to Photography, Popular Science…this pretty wide range of magazines. They worked with our friends in London, a company called BERG, and they did kind of a concept video of how magazines might work in this kind of new world of e-readers. But they didn’t want the [usual] kind of e-reader experience. And they didn’t want the .pdf experience. They really wanted to capture what it was like to read an actual magazine. Because magazines have evolved over the last 250 years, 300 years, something like that. Actually one of the first things I did when we got the product was actually go back and read the first magazine. Really? Yeah, that was the first thing. And surprisingly, there were a lot of the same things. There was still a table of contents, there was still an appendix. There were still lots of short articles, those kinds of things. So…our job was actually to take that concept and really prototype it and make it into something that would actually work. That would actually go ahead and would eventually be built and that had buy in from all the magazine’s editorial staffs at these magazines and from readers. That it was something people actually wanted to sit down and curl up and read these magazines like they would a normal magazine, a physical paper magazine right now. That’s why right now currently our walls in the studio are just covered with magazines that are torn all to bits. It looks like a magazine stand has exploded in here or something like that. But [we’re] looking at all the content types that we needed to support. Everything from table of contents to long articles to short articles to timelines to graphics to advertising to classified ads. All different kinds of content that we really had to support. And then we had to say, what are some of the--what’s it like to actually do page turning in this kind of digital world. Do we still have to have a physical page turn? How can you tell when you’re done reading an article?...We really wanted to keep some of the structure of magazines. And so some of that was finding out what that structure was. One of our mandates was that it didn’t feel like a piece of software. It wasn’t something that you booted up and had to download and read this whole thing. It wasn’t a chore. It was a magazine. It was something that you’re going to flip through as you’re killing time, or you just want a little bit of information, you want to immerse yourself in it. You don’t want to think about all the parts of it, or how do I then flip a page, how do I do all these…You just want to read the magazine. It’s really kind of a fascinating project. How do you turn something that was previously, I don’t want to say dumb, but without the digital intelligence, and how do you turn that into something with a kind of intelligence—but not ruin the experience? How do you translate the experience in a way that doesn’t feel wrong, that doesn’t feel like work, it doesn’t feel like I’m reading a .pdf. So that’s been the real challenge with it. And we’re just finishing up prototyping right now. So I imagine by the time people hear this… Bonnier will have released it. What’s the next step for it? Would Bonnier offer it as hardware? Would they offer it as an app for the iPad, or… I think they’re figuring that out. My guess is, from what I know…that it’s something that will be delivered on various platforms as some kind of pay in service. That being said, there certainly could be [opportunities] where they could sell their own reader…maybe there [should be] a special Bon Air reader…that’s customized for magazine reading specifically. That maybe has things like, it can get wet! We found that an amazing number of people read in the bathtub. I read an interview where you said that you wrote Designing Gestural Interfaces because at the time, there was no substantial resource on this particular subject. Right. Because I started writing it, probably…two-and-a-half, three years ago…Prior to that I had mostly done web work. But I suddenly started finding myself doing a lot more touch screen work…So I started trying to research the subject, and was finding it very difficult to get good solid information about it…just the basic stuff. Like, how big should the touch target be on the screen for someone to reasonably tap. And I couldn’t find it. So I said, “There’s clearly this hole in the market.” And I just set about writing the book. Because I knew that if I didn’t write it, someone else would. DS: It’s an interesting time because we’re definitely in an interaction revolution…A lot of the paradigms that we’ve used for 40 years now, things like cut-and-paste, we still have them around. The laptop’s not going anywhere quite yet. But now we have this new language on top of it that is the language of gestures and the language of touch. So projects like Mag+, a couple of years ago, would have been totally different. You would have had buttons on the side like you did on the early version of the Kindle. And that’s how you would be flipping pages. You couldn’t just swipe and flip a page. You just, it wasn’t going to happen. And now it just seems like a natural thing. I mean, granted, touch screens have been around for almost 40 years at this point, but it’s really taken that long for the technology and the market to mature to the point where—getting back to that desirability thing—where people really want them. They see the value in it and can then say, “Wow. I want that in my stuff.” And now we’ve almost gone overboard with it. Now it’s like, “Let’s put touch screens in everything. Your toilet now has a touch screen on it.” Someone actually called me about having a touch screen in a shower. The less said about it the better. But it’s interesting to think you can have computing power in places where you never had it before. And that’s both good and bad, of course. Why does my shower have to be invaded by my email? It doesn’t. I like that five minutes in the shower where I don’t have to think about anything. DS: [With touch-screens], there is this kind of like, “As soon as I’m touching it, I’m already doing something. Oh wow. I didn’t have to click on it. I’m touching it. Now something’s happening.” Which is both good and bad. There is definitely this odd fear factor, and it’s kind of a physiological one. Some research figured out that people are actually afraid of being electrocuted as they touch electrical objects. It’s like a fight-or-flight thing. And getting people over that is a major concern. Which is why that really nice slide to unlock thing on the iPhone is really nice. It’s this really simple thing like, “If I can do that…” “Oh! It unlocks!” and “Oh, there’s some other stuff here I can touch…” Do you think that in this heyday of touch screens, with the iPad coming out, with Microsoft Surface, is this heralding a new era in user experience? Yeah. It is an interesting turning point in time. Because all of a sudden, computing power is so cheap it can be disseminated everywhere. It’s on surfaces, on walls, on tables. It’s in our pockets. We’re just surrounded by it all the time. And user experience and interaction design is playing a big role in that introduction of this new technology, what we can do with it, and how it can hopefully make our lives better—and not make our lives suddenly overburdened or crushed by information. All those things that really could happen. We could lose all of our privacy. We could lose all these things that we now take for granted, but could easily be taken away from us, thanks to the technology that we’re trying to get people to buy. So it’s an interesting time. And really, I kind of see user experience people being on the front line of keeping technology, and what it can do for us, really making it for human beings. And I think that the good that we can do for the world, is really make this stuff useful, usable, desirable, and not overburden us—and treat us with the dignity and respect that we should get as human beings. It’s kind of a hard thing to [realize] when you’re in the middle of a project, and you’re cranking out these deliverables and doing your wire frames or your site map, your CAD drawings…But this stuff goes out in the world and it makes a huge difference to people. That’s why I do it, really. [amazonshowcase_e6f1276dc91277bc9743cd1ebe7f1b44]" ["post_title"]=> string(30) "Dan Saffer: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(393) "The co-founder of Kicker Studio explains to us that “User Experience” isn’t a discipline, so much as a big tent. We talk about his work on the Mag+ project and he reveals some tricks-of-the-trade about how to get “the long wow” with a product. We delve into how you can engineer desire into a product by infusing it with personality--especially when it fails. Oh, and we talk robots." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(10) "dan-saffer" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 07:55:06" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 14:55:06" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(10) "1205982061" ["menu_order"]=> int(6) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(2) "42" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } } }

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