Babysitting the interface: The myth of self-service

As we prepared for another road trip and the attendant joy of air travel in America in 2010, I was musing about the common sight of a human being helping passengers use the so-called "self-service" kiosk. It was in that frame of mind that I went to Facebook; I had to laugh when I saw this screen with the instruction: DO NOT CLICK THE "Go to Application" BUTTON ON LEFT!

Human intervention with software, Web pages, and kiosks is a regular occurrence across corporate America. You see it first-hand at airport counters, supermarkets, a co-worker's desk. We see it inside call centers and controlled environments. How much does this cost business, education, and nonprofits every day?

Well into the year 2010, we are still seeing an utter failure to budget - or even account for - the design of information structure, meaning: Where will this digital media experience begin and end? How does the user know where he is in the morass of content? How do you know whether you've seen and experienced all the content? How does he get to related content? Did anyone design or plan this experience? What are the opportunity costs related to this basic failure of planning?

In 2000, seven years into the commercial Web, a failure to plan and structure digital media interaction was understandable. Skeptics were still expecting (or hoping) that the Web would die. In 2010, the failure to plan and structure digital media is unforgivable.

If your digital media project lacks a budget item for information design (information architecture, task sequence design, user interface design), it is destined to under-perform and disappoint. Web sites and applications, software applications, kiosks, intranets, instrumentation interfaces - any digital implementation must include planning and architecture beyond simple functionality and appearance.

The Self-Service and Kiosk Association begins to address the usability issue in a blog post by Stephen Kendig, but the industry is just beginning to scratch the surface. If we use the Web as an object lesson, bad information design proliferates more quickly than good design. We will be living in a dystopian reality if the same problem propagates across self-service in a world that seems determined to eliminate human-powered customer service. The current economic woes will only exacerbate the problem.

If we're going to eliminate the human from the equation at all the transaction points of daily life, the digital interface must be bulletproof. Else we are destined for the worst of both worlds - unhappy customers, unhappy workers. Babysitting an interface is no one's career goal.

User Experience: What's Your Fail?

I've been excited to see that user experience (UX) has been a big topic and in demand at SXSW Interactive this year. We've built Interface Guru around user experience design principles over the last 10 years, and frankly it sometimes feels like we're alone in the jungle.

The first session track ever devoted entirely to user experience design at the conference was held on Saturday, and its opening workshop ("The Ten Commandments of User Experience") packed a large ballroom and left a line of people standing outside. It had tough competition, too: the keynote address was going on at the same time.

Judging from the Twitter feed for the session (at #uxsxsw - thank you to presenters Nick Finck and Raina Van Cleave for hacking the 18-character official hashtag and shortening it), many participants were disappointed in the introductory nature of some of the sessions.

Comments:

"(Has) the UX community stopped thinking about new ways of doing things or am I at the wrong conference? Mostly old news so far."

"The last UX session of the day is the first where I've seen people actually walk out to move to another session."

"I agree with your twitter stream. #uxsxsw has been underwhelming - what about what's next?"

I have to admit I shared the sentiment - until I took a closer look at the program. Specifically, the ubiquitous pocket schedule everyone relies on to keep track of what's going on at SXSW.

If you look closely at the events on the schedule, each session has a small circle, square, or diamond next to it - indicating the session is either beginning, intermediate, or advanced. The two sessions people complained the most about had circles next to them, indicating they were basic introductions to the subject matter.



I only discovered this because I happened to open my pocket guide to the front for the first time during the conference, and stumbled across the key to the symbols, which only appears on the first page.

It's a classic fail: Assuming your users are going to look at your information in a linear fashion and understand that icons have meaning, without labels to guide them.

I've conducted an informal survey since, asking my fellow conference attendees (especially those who complain about a lack of relevance or depth in sessions) if they knew that the symbols in the schedule meant something. I've yet to find someone who noticed this helpful bit of information.

Once they realized the importance of the iconography, people I've spoken to have said they would have been able to use this information to narrow their selection of sessions to something more relevant, creating a more positive user experience.

Think about all the thousands and millions of dollars it takes to put the hard stuff together for one of the biggest conferences in the country: assembling panels, printing conference materials, advertising - the list goes on and on. Only to have many of your customers' satisfaction with your product come down to a few inexpensive labels and icons on a piece of paper.

What's YOUR fail?

Error message of the day from Tweaker Speakers Grandmax

I loved my Tweaker Speakers until one inexplicably died. So I go to Grandmax for tech support. After clicking the support link, here's the error message:

"We're sorry, we're temporarily undergoing maintenance!
[Saeven|CRM cannot operate with register_globals set to 'On'. Set this to 'Off' using php.ini or a .htaccess directive, and restart your webserver thereafter.]

If you would like to contact us in the interim, please do so at admin_at_toqen_dot_com"

Grrrrr.

Surviving SXSW Interactive

In four years of attending South by Southwest Interactive, I've learned one thing above all else: If you don't arrive with a plan, you're screwed.

Whether it's how you're going to get from your hotel to the convention center (if you're not already downtown, it's a nightmare), to how you're going to eat (A hotel circle with almost no restaurants. Really?), to which after-session parties to network at, it isn't a conference as much as it is a tactical military operation.

And that's not even factoring in the conference itself.

My long-time friend and Internet colleague Ward Andrews drove this point home Tuesday on the phone, as we were conferring on strategy.

"Do you know what sessions you're attending?"

I've tried to schedule. Really, I have. I can't get past the first session, which starts today at 2 p.m. There are 19 sessions going on concurrently, eight of which I want to attend. These eight aren't sessions I'm kind of interested in - they're all "must-sees."

If I go to any one of these eight, I'll miss easily the most popular session every year: "How to Rawk SXSW." Fittingly enough, it's a session devoted entirely to surviving South by Southwest. In fact, going on at the same time is a session addressing "SXSW SARS" - the name given to exhaustion that brings on sickness from trying to do too much in this pure chaos.

It's a great test bed for using technology to make life easier because it mimics the information overload we experience in our everyday lives ... to an extreme. Kind of like putting cars through the roughest conditions to ensure their safety (maybe this isn't the best example right now).

Ward turned me on to the latest weapon in managing the chaos: It's a mobile site called SitBy.Us (www.sitby.us) created by Weightshift (www.weightshift.com). Not only does it have the complete SXSW schedule and descriptions in an optimized layout for all mobile devices, but it also allows you to create a personalized schedule.

The kicker: Log in with your Twitter account and you can see what sessions your Twitter friends are attending. Once you show up for the session, you can let your friends know where you are sitting by selecting your location on a map of the room. How cool is that? The app also will tweet your session with a link to the description.

Ward, my brother Greg, and I are brewing a plan to use this app and Twitter to mount a guerrilla attack on providing simultaneous coverage of the conference. Stay tuned!