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For one thing, he looks a lot younger than his 15 years in the Usability and design fields would imply. And he’s much more mild-mannered in person than his prolific blogging and busy conference schedule would suggest. Oh, and he doesn’t work at Yahoo anymore, which one suspects he might have had an inkling about when we interviewed him there the other month. But what, he’s going to clue us in? We’re press. One place where the name is firmly on the tin is in his know-how and grasp of the UX field. His popular design books, Site Seeing and Designing Web Forms, speak to that. He was kind enough to sit down with us in Yahoo’s Sunnyvale offices to talk about UX in general and web forms in particular—including how to get the guy in the corner office to throw money at redesigning them. “Nobody wants to fill out web forms.” He admitted matter-of-factly. “What [users] want is something on the other side. They want to buy something. they want to communicate with their friends. They want to have their opinions heard…The form really sits at this lynch-pin point of engagement online.” How much difference can a form re-design make? “It’s not uncommon for a web form redesign to move metrics up into the double digits, to reduce error rates something like 80%...At eBay, we were constantly tuning and optimizing the key forms. The business folks knew hands-down what kind of lever that was.” Who else “gets it?” Luke cited YouTube, a site that gets around 150,000 videos uploaded per hour, all via--say it with us, class--“A web form! Those guys have redesigned that web form 10 times that I know of.” Successful use cases like these also support WANT_001’s theme, “The Engineering of Want.” As Luke sees it, “One of the things that you can do to sort of increase desire is remove obstacles.” The easier you make that web form, the more easily a user can get what they came for. Luke’s favorite example of a usable, want-able web form is from a lesser-known service: Geni.com. A social network based on family trees, and one of Time Magazine’s “50 Best Websites of 2008,” Geni’s home page is a form that makes you feel like you’ve gotten something back from the time you spent filling it out. “Their front page looks like a little family tree. It says ‘your mom, your dad,’ and down below it says ‘you’…[the “you” field] has ‘first name,’ ‘last name,’ ‘email address,’ ‘go.’ So it’s technically a web form, but it’s designed around your explicit need, which is ‘I want to make a family tree.’ Super easy. Before you know it, you’ve created the scene and are engaged and you want to share and get it out there.” Luke insists that a sense of progress is the driving factor of good form design. One of the questions he consistently fields is “How long should my web form be?” Which he tends to answer with another question: “Are [users] making forward progress towards what they actually want? If they are, then they’ll fill in 20 pages!” Which brought our conversation to any UX-pert’s favorite subject: Do you review the company’s resources and abilities first, then try to fit those into the customer’s needs, or do you start with the customers’ needs and see how the company’s resources can fulfill them? In this regard, Luke cites Lou Carbone as an influence. “One of the phrases that he uses is, ‘Think outside in.’ The vast majority of people building products and kind of running a business are thinking inside out. “Inside/out thinking tends to be: ‘This is the database technology we have available. This is the easiest way to display a form on a web page to get the information that we need.’” And so on, with little thought about the customer’s needs and proclivities. Web forms, in particular, are so closely tied into a company’s database technologies that a customer-focused perspective is rare. Which might explain Luke’s poor opinion of Web usability in general. “I think the vast majority of the web experiences out there are pretty terrible right now. They are defined through what they are versus what the people using them want to accomplish.” When asked about the future of UX, his answer was similar to Don Norman’s: that the interface will disappear. Or in Luke’s words: “we’ve been removing more and more layers of abstraction between the person and the content in the tasks and activities they want to accomplish.” Consider command-line coding--typing in commands and “if/then” statements to get the computer to do anything--a “fully abstracted” user experience. The creation of a GUI made the experience less abstract, with file folder systems and menus full of choices, but it still required unintuitive interactions like dragging discs to the trash can to eject them. Take, for example, photos: In the typical GUI, you’re still clicking and dragging icons of photos, not full graphic representations of the photos themselves. Which brings us to the latest generation of UI, “Natural User Interfaces” (NUIs) that remove another crucial layer of abstraction. Luke, like most UX minds these days, cites the iPad as the most popular current representation of that. “There is a lot of conversation around Apple’s iPad. It doesn’t really have a window system, doesn’t have any kind of control panel, it doesn’t have a hierarchical folder system…it doesn’t have all these layers of abstractions that keep you away from the content.” Luke uses the iPad photo experience as an example. “You are literally interacting with the content…You want the photo? there’s the photo. Move the photo, touch the photo, re-size the photo, spin the photo…” He also pointed out that this kind of NUI is likely to catch on, due to Apple’s considerable touch-screen user-base, as well as pure economics. “Jeff Dachis said that everything that can be digital, will be digital, because it’s faster, easier and cheaper. It allows you to do so much more with it.” A published author, it’s only natural that Luke would cite books as another example. “I love holding a book and flipping through it, but it sucks for searching. It’s terrible for sharing. It’s actually pretty bad for annotation and recall as well. It doesn’t take advantage of all these things that the digital realm can do to make it better. Which is why I think a lot of these new interfaces are so exciting; they bring that power.” What’s next after touch-screen interfaces? The real world, of course. Luke has named the next wave of UX “first person user interfaces,” that reduce abstraction further by bringing digital materials into the real world via contextual interfaces like GPS and RFID. “The devices you [already] have are sensor-rich enough that they understand the context of where you are. Mobile phones are an early indicator of this. They’ve got GPS, they have a compass, they know where you are and what direction you are facing, so they can remove all the things in between you and the space you are in and really bring information to you that’s relevant right then and there. “[Let’s say] there’s something [nearby] that has an RFID tag. I can get information about that object without having to go through these layers of operating system.” Author William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.” Luke Wroblewski sees a future where objects become open books, books become digital objects, and digital objects become easier to use than ever. And yes, it’s happening now. All in all, his take on the future is as interesting—and unexpected—as the man himself. [amazonshowcase_50a9e933d0f4dd878f84caeb2c0c06d2]" ["post_title"]=> string(35) "Luke Wroblewski: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(304) "Our talk with the former Chief Design Architect at Yahoo! covers his new book, Web Form Design, and includes advice on how to explain the importance of web form design to the folks in the corner offices. We talk about the digitization of objects and how removing obstacles makes a product more desirable." 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For one thing, he looks a lot younger than his 15 years in the Usability and design fields would imply. And he’s much more mild-mannered in person than his prolific blogging and busy conference schedule would suggest. Oh, and he doesn’t work at Yahoo anymore, which one suspects he might have had an inkling about when we interviewed him there the other month. But what, he’s going to clue us in? We’re press. One place where the name is firmly on the tin is in his know-how and grasp of the UX field. His popular design books, Site Seeing and Designing Web Forms, speak to that. He was kind enough to sit down with us in Yahoo’s Sunnyvale offices to talk about UX in general and web forms in particular—including how to get the guy in the corner office to throw money at redesigning them. “Nobody wants to fill out web forms.” He admitted matter-of-factly. “What [users] want is something on the other side. They want to buy something. they want to communicate with their friends. They want to have their opinions heard…The form really sits at this lynch-pin point of engagement online.” How much difference can a form re-design make? “It’s not uncommon for a web form redesign to move metrics up into the double digits, to reduce error rates something like 80%...At eBay, we were constantly tuning and optimizing the key forms. The business folks knew hands-down what kind of lever that was.” Who else “gets it?” Luke cited YouTube, a site that gets around 150,000 videos uploaded per hour, all via--say it with us, class--“A web form! Those guys have redesigned that web form 10 times that I know of.” Successful use cases like these also support WANT_001’s theme, “The Engineering of Want.” As Luke sees it, “One of the things that you can do to sort of increase desire is remove obstacles.” The easier you make that web form, the more easily a user can get what they came for. Luke’s favorite example of a usable, want-able web form is from a lesser-known service: Geni.com. A social network based on family trees, and one of Time Magazine’s “50 Best Websites of 2008,” Geni’s home page is a form that makes you feel like you’ve gotten something back from the time you spent filling it out. “Their front page looks like a little family tree. It says ‘your mom, your dad,’ and down below it says ‘you’…[the “you” field] has ‘first name,’ ‘last name,’ ‘email address,’ ‘go.’ So it’s technically a web form, but it’s designed around your explicit need, which is ‘I want to make a family tree.’ Super easy. Before you know it, you’ve created the scene and are engaged and you want to share and get it out there.” Luke insists that a sense of progress is the driving factor of good form design. One of the questions he consistently fields is “How long should my web form be?” Which he tends to answer with another question: “Are [users] making forward progress towards what they actually want? If they are, then they’ll fill in 20 pages!” Which brought our conversation to any UX-pert’s favorite subject: Do you review the company’s resources and abilities first, then try to fit those into the customer’s needs, or do you start with the customers’ needs and see how the company’s resources can fulfill them? In this regard, Luke cites Lou Carbone as an influence. “One of the phrases that he uses is, ‘Think outside in.’ The vast majority of people building products and kind of running a business are thinking inside out. “Inside/out thinking tends to be: ‘This is the database technology we have available. This is the easiest way to display a form on a web page to get the information that we need.’” And so on, with little thought about the customer’s needs and proclivities. Web forms, in particular, are so closely tied into a company’s database technologies that a customer-focused perspective is rare. Which might explain Luke’s poor opinion of Web usability in general. “I think the vast majority of the web experiences out there are pretty terrible right now. They are defined through what they are versus what the people using them want to accomplish.” When asked about the future of UX, his answer was similar to Don Norman’s: that the interface will disappear. Or in Luke’s words: “we’ve been removing more and more layers of abstraction between the person and the content in the tasks and activities they want to accomplish.” Consider command-line coding--typing in commands and “if/then” statements to get the computer to do anything--a “fully abstracted” user experience. The creation of a GUI made the experience less abstract, with file folder systems and menus full of choices, but it still required unintuitive interactions like dragging discs to the trash can to eject them. Take, for example, photos: In the typical GUI, you’re still clicking and dragging icons of photos, not full graphic representations of the photos themselves. Which brings us to the latest generation of UI, “Natural User Interfaces” (NUIs) that remove another crucial layer of abstraction. Luke, like most UX minds these days, cites the iPad as the most popular current representation of that. “There is a lot of conversation around Apple’s iPad. It doesn’t really have a window system, doesn’t have any kind of control panel, it doesn’t have a hierarchical folder system…it doesn’t have all these layers of abstractions that keep you away from the content.” Luke uses the iPad photo experience as an example. “You are literally interacting with the content…You want the photo? there’s the photo. Move the photo, touch the photo, re-size the photo, spin the photo…” He also pointed out that this kind of NUI is likely to catch on, due to Apple’s considerable touch-screen user-base, as well as pure economics. “Jeff Dachis said that everything that can be digital, will be digital, because it’s faster, easier and cheaper. It allows you to do so much more with it.” A published author, it’s only natural that Luke would cite books as another example. “I love holding a book and flipping through it, but it sucks for searching. It’s terrible for sharing. It’s actually pretty bad for annotation and recall as well. It doesn’t take advantage of all these things that the digital realm can do to make it better. Which is why I think a lot of these new interfaces are so exciting; they bring that power.” What’s next after touch-screen interfaces? The real world, of course. Luke has named the next wave of UX “first person user interfaces,” that reduce abstraction further by bringing digital materials into the real world via contextual interfaces like GPS and RFID. “The devices you [already] have are sensor-rich enough that they understand the context of where you are. Mobile phones are an early indicator of this. They’ve got GPS, they have a compass, they know where you are and what direction you are facing, so they can remove all the things in between you and the space you are in and really bring information to you that’s relevant right then and there. “[Let’s say] there’s something [nearby] that has an RFID tag. I can get information about that object without having to go through these layers of operating system.” Author William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.” Luke Wroblewski sees a future where objects become open books, books become digital objects, and digital objects become easier to use than ever. And yes, it’s happening now. All in all, his take on the future is as interesting—and unexpected—as the man himself. [amazonshowcase_50a9e933d0f4dd878f84caeb2c0c06d2]" ["post_title"]=> string(35) "Luke Wroblewski: The Want Interview" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(304) "Our talk with the former Chief Design Architect at Yahoo! covers his new book, Web Form Design, and includes advice on how to explain the importance of web form design to the folks in the corner offices. We talk about the digitization of objects and how removing obstacles makes a product more desirable." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(15) "luke-wroblewski" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 07:53:09" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-05-18 14:53:09" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(25) "http://wantmagazine/?p=16" ["menu_order"]=> int(3) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(2) "62" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" } [1]=> object(stdClass)#322 (24) { ["ID"]=> int(34) ["post_author"]=> string(1) "1" ["post_date"]=> string(19) "2010-04-27 00:01:48" ["post_date_gmt"]=> string(19) "2010-04-27 07:01:48" ["post_content"]=> string(14516) "Yessir, there’s nothing like working for a quarterly publication in today’s fast-and-loose online media environment. 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. 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